Not role models... but they had fun!

In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate The World Simon Garfield Canongate €18.10

One of many startling revelations in Simon Garfield’s new book is that Rod Stewart, Roger Daltrey and Neil Young are all compulsive model railway enthusiasts. Indeed, for many years Young wrote a problem-solving column in a leading modelling magazine, answering questions such as ‘Do I really need 18 volts to run Trainmaster Command Control?’ This, as the author dryly observes, from the same man who wrote Heart Of Gold and Harvest.

But that’s the striking thing about this celebration of minute modelling – the desire to reduce the world around us to manageable proportions can fire up the most unlikely person and quickly mutate from a hobby into a passion.

Garfield wanders through the world of the miniature and micro-miniature, chronicling a human menagerie of oddballs, obsessives and geniuses who have each made it their life’s work to go small in order to illuminate larger truths and offer a new perspective on life and the universe.

What of ‘retired stationery supplies impresario’ Philip Warren, for instance, who has devoted every spare hour of his adult life to constructing 476 miniature replicas of famous battleships out of matchsticks?

Or farmer Alec Garrard, who spent 30 years creating a meticulous 1:100 representation of the Temple of Jerusalem in his Suffolk barn?

Garrard’s family and friends questioned the mental health of a man ‘fiddling about with an apparently never-ending, meaningless and pointless project’, but neither he nor Warren appear to have regretted a second of their time, Warren describing his misplaced years and 700,000 matchsticks as ‘pure pleasure’.

From flea circuses through to the art of painting a depiction of Cassius Clay fighting Sonny Liston on the head of a pin, In Miniature is a delicious read: quirky, unpredictable and written with a genuine savour for the subject.