This book is part of Hermann Zschiegner’s Bootleg Edition, a series of books reproducing famous photobooks that are no longer available (due to being out of stock or too expensive to obtain). Their reproduction is based on flip-through videos: a presentation form for books used on video platforms to show their materiality as well as parts of their content. Flip-throughs are used for advertisement, but also to give a broader audience an impression of rare or materially exceptional books.

Zschiegner’s Astronomical. The Bootleg shows screenshots of an illegally downloaded copy of Mishka Henner’s ASTRONOMICAL – The Movie that shows a flip-through of the first volume of Henner’s eponymous twelve-volume book series that contains “a scale model of our solar system […]: On page 1 the Sun, on page 6,000 Pluto. The width of each page equals one million kilometers” (Mishka Henner, blurb). The first volume takes us from the sun to Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt.

For the bootleg of ASTRONOMICAL, Zschiegner mainly used stills showing fully opened page spreads of the original, but a few stills also capture the turning of pages or hands on the book. The quality loss of his reproduction is a result of the remediation from book to film to book, but also of print-on-demand’s poor printing quality. As with the mostly black pages of Henner’s series, one cannot be sure when looking at Zschiegner’s reproduction whether the tiny white dots are actually stars in the black vastness of space or white pixels caused by remediation and printing errors. Our copy also has glaring defects in the perfect binding, so that even after a short use the pages lose their hold, as the photos show.

Zschiegner also made a book video, which is advertised as: “A BookVideo of the acclaimed bootleg copy by Hermann Zschiegner of Mishka Henner’s even more acclaimed ASTRONOMICAL.”