Over winter break I trimmed, folded, and bound 15 extremely tiny books.
Just as soon as I finished binding one, my child would insist that I read it to him. Once we were done, he would have me read it aloud one more time, for good measure. Then he would place it on the tiny bookshelf included in the kit.
The 8.5×11” sheets of paper kept turning into tiny but still real and readable books, and we found ourselves enchanted.
I don’t think it’s coincidence that the texts selected by the creators of this kit are mostly fairy tales. Fairy tales regularly feature wild fluctuations of scale. Case in point: the library includes The Princess and the Pea, The Elves and the Shoemaker, The Frog Prince, and Thumbelina.
Dramatic changes in scale are well-known to elicit wonder. They also have the effect of destabilizing one’s sense of reality. I think of Derek Zoolander throwing an architectural model to the floor and raging, “What is this, a center for ants!?” I also think of a young Vladimir Nabokov being given “a giant polygonal Faber pencil, four feet long and correspondingly thick,” and wondering “whether the point was made of real graphite.” As he explains,
It was. And some years later I satisfied myself, by drilling a hole in the side, that the lead went right through the whole length—a perfect case of art for art’s sake on the part of Faber and Dr. Libner since the pencil was far too big for use and, indeed, was not meant to be used. (Speak, Memory, 38-39)
Just as it would be aesthetically wrong for the giant pencil to have only an inch of lead at the point, the tiny book might be impractically small, yet it still must be carefully typeset. Indeed, it must be printed with a real, complete literary work. Only then, as you actually read this book sized for a mouse, do you get the full experience.
A phase change occurs when you fold paper. Though the surface area remains the same, the paper gains a third dimension. Now the book can be flipped through. You can tell where you are in it just by feeling how many pages are to the left and right of the fold. You bind the book, giving it a front and back cover, a spine.
A book is a bounded quantity. It literally is what fits between its bindings, and no more.
The book feels suddenly full of secrets. Each page turn is a revelation.
The opposite of a book is a scroll. Or a smartphone, which takes scroll and makes a verb of it. One of the most basic things you can say about a scroll or a screen is that it lacks depth, lacks a third dimension. Instead of a binding—flat infinity.
The smallest book I own is a Russian-language copy of the Lord’s Prayer. My friend Abraham gave it to me years ago.
The book is made of cast metal, yet the text is legible and the prayer complete. It comes with with a loop for you to string a chain through, so you can wear it around your neck as an amulet. Its protective magic flows directly from the miniaturized scale of the object.
Puppets, pincushions, inflatable frog suits—unconventional methods allow us to engage our world and our preconceptions in playful ways.
Playing with scale does, too.