The enormous and infinite delights of miniature books
The Brontë Society has spent more than £660,000 at auction this week securing a manuscript written by Charlotte Brontë when she was 14. They aren’t getting much book for their buck. The handwritten book comprises only 20 pages and measures a mere 1.4in (35mm) by 2.4in (61mm). It is an edition of Young Men’s Magazine, a periodical Charlotte created with her brother Branwell, supposedly for the delectation of his toy soldiers.
It’s an awful lot of money per word, but those of us who make the pilgrimage to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth now and again should be pleased that Judi Dench and other celebrity Brontë-maniacs raised the necessary cash. There is a unique pleasure to be had in contemplating miniature books.
They make us look at the book with fresh eyes, reminding us what a brilliant invention it is; and they help to make us aware, at a time when e-readers and ugly, breeze block-like paperbacks make us take books for granted, of how much effort has been expended over the centuries on making books both practical and aesthetically pleasing.
The earliest known miniatures – the term is usually used to denote books measuring no more than three inches in height, width and thickness – are cuneiform tablets from ancient Mesopotamia, containing information for use in the trading of animals and food. As late as the 18th century, traders kept miniature volumes attached to their belts for handy perusal of the details of foreign measurements or currency. In the past, scholars constructed a library’s worth of mini books that they could carry around to aid them in debate, and devotional books have often taken miniature form in order to be more portable or, if necessary, more easily hidden.
The most celebrated crafter of miniature books, David Bryce of Glasgow, made miniature editions of the Koran in metal lockets, which were issued with magnifying glasses to Muslim soldiers during the First World War; as well as being portable, they were regarded as talismans.
In recent years some scientists have become obsessed with making ever smaller books. Among the most notable is Pawan Sinha, who developed a project to etch the New Testament in gold on to a crystalline silicon chip five millimetres square; each character is about four microns high, roughly the height of a red blood cell.
The problem is that in the rush to break the record for the world’s weeniest book, people can lose sight of what books are actually for. A few years ago an eminent American bibliophile showed a reporter from The New York Times his copy – “the size of a large grain of sand” – of Chekhov’s short story The Chameleon, but when asked what the story was about confessed that he didn’t know.
But leaving aside the gimmicks, miniature books can be true works of art, such as those commissioned for Queen Mary’s doll’s house in the Twenties – Arthur Conan Doyle wrote her an original 503-word Sherlock Holmes story that filled 34 tiny pages.
Or the editions of The Divine Comedy and Galileo’s Letter to Madame Christina di Lorena that were produced by the Italian Salmin brothers in the 1870s, and were reported to have “caused injury to the eyesight of both the compositor and corrector”.
Whether it be these astonishing volumes or the teenage Charlotte Brontë’s home-made effort, looking at these little books can be salutary. They are a lesson on the value of concision, standing in stark contrast to the ever-expanding doorstops that publishers foist on us these days.
But what is most moving about them is their ability to transport us back to a time when books meant so much to our culture that the construction of them was worth taking infinite pains over.