Andy Warhol’s mythical book gets a new life: the 1967 “Index (Book)” recreated page by page

After more than five decades, one of the most famous and rarest books in art history returns to the shelves: as Artnet News reports, the publishers Phaidon and Melcher Media, in collaboration with the Andy Warhol Foundation, have recreated the 1967 “Andy Warhol’s Index (Book)” — page by page, interactive element by interactive element. The new 2026 edition is accompanied by an essay by Charles Melcher, the founder of Melcher Media.

The original book was no ordinary book. Besides photographs and texts, its pages contained pop-ups, stickers, tabs that changed colour with moisture, a silver balloon, a paper harmonica that made a sound when you turned the page and a flexible 7-inch disc mounted on a wire spring. One of its most famous pages opens into a multicoloured fold-out nose, the “Do-It-Yourself Nose Job”, modelled on the profile of Bob Dylan, who posed for a Warhol “Screen Test” in 1965.

The recreation work lasted more than five years. Melcher’s team worked on two surviving original copies, scanning them page by page to create the printing templates, and with the foundation’s help secured the rights to the photographs of Billy Name, Stephen Shore and Nat Finkelstein. The greatest challenge was the tactile elements: the pop-ups were remade with stronger paper, the only company in the U.S. that still produces flexi discs was found, while the silver balloon — whose chemical had burned the original pages and of which not a single real copy exists any more — was rebuilt from written descriptions.

“Index” is a time capsule of Warhol’s mid-’60s “Factory”: the photographs capture Edie Sedgwick, John Cale and Susan Bottomly performing; the flexi disc plays the noise of the Factory crowd over the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man”; the studio’s silver walls are reflected in the balloon. As Charles Melcher himself says, the book is ultimately “a portal to the Factory” — the pop-art object back in the public’s hands, just as Warhol had intended it.