B3ta Cofounder Rob Manuel Drew 81 Jokes Using Only the ZX81's 64 Characters, and Put Them in a 240-Page Hardback

The rules were set before the first gag. Spelk Press describes the project as an absurd challenge: write 81 jokes for the ZX81, draw them yourself, and use nothing but the characters the machine could put on screen. The page says the jokes were “painstakingly drawn using 1981’s Sinclair ZX81 graphics.” Between them run Manuel’s reminiscences about computing, creativity and 1980s culture.

That palette is tiny. The ZX81 has “64 unique glyphs present at code points 0–63,” according to the Wikipedia entry on its character set, and only 11 of them are block graphics, one of which doubles as the space. Inverse video flips each glyph for 128 in all. There’s no lowercase; the small set “has led to the exclusion of many characters, including Latin lower case letters.” Every face, prop and punchline in the book is built from those chunky quarter-squares and capitals.

The book is a pre-order for now, shipping from the UK, with import VAT or duties possible outside it. The publisher’s pitch is one line: “If you loved the ZX81, this book is for you.” Its praise section quotes Richard Herring, Joel Morris, M. J. Hibbett, Otto English and Ben Wheatley. None of the 81 jokes is on the page yet, so which one lands hardest is still a 3 December question.

Manuel has form with this kind of thing. B3ta, the site he cofounded, just marked 25 years of weekly image challenges, the current one “Game Mashups,” where the whole game is a silly brief honoured with total commitment. A book of ZX81 drawings is the same instinct, played on a single 1981 screen.

Expect more of this crossover: a well-known internet humorist, a hard technical limit and a printed object nobody strictly needed. The ZX81 is a gift to that format because its limits are so legible; anyone can see the 64 pieces and count them. The next question is whether some reader takes the hint and makes the jokes run on a real ZX81.