Miniature Books – Presentation (Tim Gao) Pliny’s famous claim that Cicero once saw a copy of Homer’s Iliad small enough to fit inside a walnut shell has long been cited as evidence for a history of the miniature book that stretches back into classical antiquity. Although almost certainly apocryphal, the frequent reiteration of this anecdote has itself become a testament to a transhistorical fascination – from Isaac Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1807) to Doris Welsh’s History of Miniature Books (1987), Pliny and the walnut always marks a dramatic start to the tradition of tiny material books. Even the mo dern idiom of summarising something “in a nutshell” apparently arises from this anecdote. What has made this anecdote so memorable and widely circulated has partly to do with the accessibility of its object comparison (the walnut has been widespread across Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean for a millennium), partly with the reputation of the classical figures involved, and partly (I would argue) with the choice of text. Of course, the only aspect of the text practically relevant to miniature book production is its material size: in this case, 15,693 lines of poetry. However, the Iliad is a big text in many other senses – as an epic, a genre defined by its grandeur; as a narrative featuring a huge cast of characters, including many gods and immortals; and as a nation-shaping classic for Greece, Rome, and much of Western Europe. So despite the obvious irrelevance of textual content to material production, the physical contraction of the text’s metaphysical size seems to exaggerate the technical impressiveness of the miniaturisation. The majority of miniature books produced up to the eighteenth century have followed this tradition of choosing big, weighty, important texts as candidates for miniaturisation. The most commonly miniaturised text in the world is the Bible, followed by devotional texts like Books of Hours, Books of Prayers and Psalms, The Imitation of Christ , and the writings of St Augustine. Especially in the Middle Ages, and in continental Europe, these books were commonly worn on the body by either being hung on necklaces or set into rings and amulets. Aside from devotional texts, the most popular miniature books were classical: as Welsh recounts, “editions of Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucanus, Ovid, Sallus, Tacitus, Terence, Virgil, etc.” But while the production of these kinds of miniature books continued throughout and after the eighteenth century, this period also saw the miniaturisation of two new types of texts: almanacs and child ren’s books. Almanacs As Doris Welch notes in her History of Miniature Books , “The number of miniature almanacs that have been printed is overwhelming – in fact so overwhelming that many collectors of miniature books do not try to collect them but are satisfied with one or two examples of a series.” The reason for this abundance is obvious: almanacs are by definition annual, and beginning from around 1690, the London Company of Stationers produced a miniature London Almanac every year until at least 1887. They ranged from about around 6 by 3cm (see 1736, 1756, and 1771 editions) to a square 3 by 3cm (see 1801 edition, a copy of which exists in the Royal Collection, gifted to Princess Augusta Sophia by “an old nurse”). The London Almanacs listed days of th e month in columns with Saint’s days, holidays, seasons, Thames high tides, and astrological information, along with other useful maps and
statistics. Being common Christmas or New Year gifts, they also included either an architectural or landscape engraving, were bound in decorated silk or leather with metal bindings, and were sold with their own slipcases. This combination of utility and decoration sets these urban almanacs apart from more functional examples like nautical and agricultural almanacs. Their miniaturisation only exaggerates this sense of split purpose: on the one hand, their portability and instant accessibility to highly compacted information makes them more efficient than a normal-sized almanac. On the other hand, their beautiful and easily damaged fold-out engravings discourages regular consultation, and their tiny, compacted type makes finding and deciphering relevant information much more difficult. Miniaturising the almanac seems to make it both more and less functional, both more utilitarian and more ornamental. The critic Kate Brown describes this as “the contradictoriness of miniature books, whose tiny size does not collapse but rather expands the time of reading. Indeed, if the size of miniature books implies complete accessibility to the whole, the minuteness of the writing implies a commensurate inaccessibility.” The attractiveness of the miniature almanac might therefore arise from this contradictory sense of implied (rather than actual) usefulness: so while trying to read the Lo ndon Almanac might (as Brown puts it) “point up the limitations of the body…the hand too large to turn pages, the eyes too weak to make out the text”, simply carrying it in the pocket or holding it in the palm might effect a sense of power, of possessing a world of information “at a grasp”. Susan Stewart suggests the way the almanac “encapsulates the details of everyday life, fitting life inside the body rather than the body inside the expansive temporality of life” as a parallel to the tradition of miniature devotional books , particularly Bibles as “the book holding the world both past and future”, a kind of divine almanac. Religious texts, whatever their size, create effect and meaning without being read: owning, wearing, showing, or touching a book like The Imitation of Christ can (like Yorick’s snuffbox) encourage virtue, or create the appearance of virtue; and as Leah Price points out, kissing or swearing on a Bible are also powerful acts of non-reading. But even more so than religious books, the miniature almanac emphasise the power of non- reading by being so tempting to hold but too difficult to read, its information both so close at hand and yet so far. Neither a full-sized almanac (which is too useful not to read) nor an almanac-shaped talisman (whi ch is useless and can’t be read) can have the same effect. Simultaneously requiring and obscuring the text, the miniature almanac exemplifies the contradictory, hybrid nature of the material book. Children’s Books In the mid-eighteenth century, another type of miniature book emerged in the form of children’s books , pioneered by publishers like John Newbery, Thomas Boreman, and John Marshall. As Julian Roberts notes i n his bibliographical work on John Newbery’s The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), eighteenth- century publishers seemed to be “under the delusion that miniature books were appropriate to miniature human beings. ” However, Goody Two-Shoes itself was already relatively large at 11cm – Newbery’s competitor, Thomas Boreman, had printed a series of books for children in the 1740s all measuring between 6 and 7cm. Through narrative and illustration, Boreman’s series detailed “curiosities” and sites of
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