This Tokenized Book Commemorates the Bright Side of a Corrupted Internet Meme
Using Pepe for Good…or at Least for Art
Rare Pepes, the very first collectible blockchain art, have entered the meatspace in the form of a book. “The Rarest Book” — a real life physical tome — contains 1,774 digitally created Rare Pepe cards. And it is glorious.
Really, it is, especially when you consider the history. Rare Pepes became a collectible phenomenon in 2016, when Joe Looney established the Rare Pepe Wallet, a digital marketplace for buying and selling the cards. These cards aren’t alt-right memes, and they have nothing to do with the original creator of Pepe the frog, Matt Furie. Rather, they were designed by a number of people, and they represent all kinds of different pop culture and artistic symbols. There’s a card featuring a Julian Assange Pepe (100 of them exist), a Salvador Dali Pepe, and even a card for the Winklevoss twins (their green heads sit atop the bodies of the twins from “The Shining” — only two of those cards exist).
The book itself, launched in October 2018, is a tokenized collectible. Only 300 have been published. “It’s like a meta Rare Pepe,” one of the book’s publishers, Louis Parker, told me. If that’s not a commentary on the real world value of digital collectibles, I don’t know what is.
