Petite pages:
Exhibition in New York City highlights ingenuity, beauty of miniature books.
The first miniature books to enter Patricia Pistner’s life were ones she made with paper and a staple gun for her childhood dollhouse many years ago. She placed them on tiny doll tables in tiny doll rooms and read them aloud to tiny dolls. “A house has to have books in it,” she said recently.
There would be more dollhouses — ones she and her husband built and furnished for his granddaughters, and the now-famous Pistner House, a 5 1/2-foot-high marvel of 18th-century French architecture and design that features perfectly scaled miniature reproductions, made over half a decade, by 65 artists and artisans. That led to a new obsession. “I made a life-changing decision to put in a library,” Pistner said, “and instead of using faux books I decided I would have real books.”
Fast forward a number of years — and a number of courses on antiquarian books, miniature books and the history of bookbinding — to now, when Pistner has become one of the country’s foremost collectors of miniature books. About 950 books from her collection are on display at the Grolier Club, the nation’s oldest society of bibliophiles, in New York City. (The exhibition, curated by Pistner and Jan Storm van Leeuwen, closes on May 19.)
Pistner, 69, sees her tiny books not just as intricately designed, differently scaled versions of things she loves already but also as important artifacts in the development of books through history, reflecting “the finest examples of various binding styles,” she said.
Most of the books in the exhibit are about 1 to 3 inches high and would nestle easily in the palm of your hand. Some are the size of a thumbnail. (There are also a few ultra-microminiatures, with no dimension greater than a quarter of an inch; one, shockingly, looks to be about as big as the period in this sentence.) The oldest is a cuneiform tablet from about 2300 B.C.; the newest was published last year. They are valued in the tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars; the rarest of miniature antiquarian books can sell in the six or even
seven figures.
There are religious books and history books; almanacs and devotionals; picture books and novels and poetry; printed books and handmade manuscripts; collections of Shakespeare and books about the alphabet. Many are elaborately and extravagantly bound, with covers inlaid in materials including gold and silver and jewels. Some were made as exquisite little objects; others were meant to be read frequently, tucked inside a pocket and carried close to their owners’ hearts for ease of consultation. Some are feats of extreme miniaturization. A few are tokens of love.
At the Grolier, the exhibit takes up just a modest-sized room and hallway. But it turns out that you can fit a lot of teeny books into a relatively small space. A few days before the exhibit opened, Pistner was there to put the finishing touches on the display — she made the tiny stands for her tiny objects herself, out of Vivak plasticlike material — and to talk about her passion for her books.
Asking her to choose favorites is like asking parents which of their children they love the best, but here are a few highlights from the collection:
‘Galileo a Madama Cristina di Loretto’
In its original Latin, albeit smaller, Galileo’s famous 1615 letter to Cosimo d’medici’s mother lays out his (heretical) reasoning for why the Bible should not be used as a basis for scientific belief. The fact that it is printed in 2-point “fly’s eye” type — by comparison, the type in many printed newspapers is 8.7 points — makes it all the more exciting. It is considered to be one of the most famous miniature books in the world, Pistner said, because of its size (the binding is 18 millimeters, or about 0.7 of an inch, high) and the quality of its craftsmanship.
Octagonal Quran
One of two tiny eightsided Qurans in the exhibit, this is a complete transcription of the Islamic holy book, probably from the 19th century. It measures in at a mere 50 by 45 by 12 mm and has fetching gold pigment on its cover and elaborate floral designs inside. “A miniature Quran permits a protective intimacy with the revealed word of God through wearing, carrying or close placement,” Pistner writes in the exhibit’s catalog. In the Ottoman era, mini Qurans were also placed on banners carried into battle.
Obsidian magical gem covered with Greek inscriptions
This very small 2,300-odd-years-old solid-black object is replete with writing, much of it consisting of apparently indecipherable magic spells. But around its sides is a four-line invocation calling on the creator of the universe “to give strength, health and salvation and to protect the wearer from evil and harmful spirits.” Such objects were actually amulets often worn or carried by their owners during the Roman Empire.
Two speeches by Abraham Lincoln
Not only is this one of the teeniest manuscripts ever produced by the renowned London bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe, it also contains two of the most stirring speeches in American history: The Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. The book was exquisitely handwritten and illuminated around 1930 by Alberto Sangorski, brother of one of the firm’s founders, and includes a tiny painting of Lincoln. Founded at the beginning of the 20th century, Sangorski & Sutcliffe became known for reviving the Middle Ages custom of creating sumptuous jeweled bindings.