Michael Mandiberg, a New York based artist, is creating a print edition of Wikipedia that runs to 7,600 volumes and is priced at $500,000. Mandiberg teaches at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written software that parses the entirety of the English-language Wikipedia database and programmatically lays out 7,600 volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them to print-on-demand site Lulu.Com.

An exhibition in New York’s East Village will show the entire 11 GB compressed file being uploaded to the site. The exhibition will see the Denny gallery’s walls lined with wallpaper showing the spines of the first 1,980 volumes in the set, supplemented by 106 actual physical volumes, each of which runs to 700 pages.

The first entry will be the 91-volume table of contents listing the nearly 11.5 million articles. Then there will be more than 500 volumes containing entries beginning with typographical symbols and numbers, starting with ‘!’ (the exclamation point), ‘!!’ (notation for an excellent move in chess) and ‘!!!’ (a dance-punk band from Sacramento).

There is also a 36-volume contributors index, listing each of the nearly 7.5 million named users who have made even a single edit since Wikipedia began in 2001.