Miniature Books Presentation (Tim Gao) Plinys famous claim that - - PDF document

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 modern 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 children’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 the 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 London 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 (which 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 in his bibliographical work on John Newbery’s The History
• f 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

interest around London, the most popular of which was The gigantick history of the two famous giants, and other curiosities in Guildhall, London (1740). But while the format of modern children’s books – being bigger, sturdier, and with thicker pages the younger its target audience – seems to vindicate Robert’s comment about the “delusion” of shrinking down texts to match its readers, publishers like Boreman and Newbery achieved immense success with their little books. Echoing the contrast between physical and textual sizes in the miniature almanac and the walnut Iliad, the deliberate mismatch and self-conscious humour of titling a 6cm volume The gigantick history of the two famous giants makes the book itself an example of the “curiosities” it promises to reveal inside, as well as exactly the kind of contrary object attractive to young readers. This inverted relationship between material form and textual content would have been made even more apparent by the positioning of Boreman’s bookstall in Guildhall, near the two famous statues themselves – a fact advertised in the book’s frontmatter. The book therefore not only invites a mental comparison between material and meaning, but also an immediate, physical, object- to-object comparison with the actual giants. Like the miniature almanac and the miniature Bible, the miniature children’s book objectifies itself and draws attention to its own materiality. But unlike those more traditional genres, which emphasise their microcosmic containment of the worlds of knowledge and narrative within them, children’s books acknowledge their place among other objects, and interact with the external world in which they circulate. Just as The gigantick history creates a double vision of the Guildhall giants as being both within and without the book, other miniature children’s books in this period also reach out to other objects within their physical proximity. John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, for example, is sold with a pincushion, which it mentions alongside itself in its introduction by Jack the Giant-killer: I have here sent you a Little Pretty Pocket-Book…But my dear Polly, in order that you may be as good as possible, I have also sent you a Pincushion; the one Side of which is Red, the other Black, and with it ten Pins; and I must insist upon making this Bargain, that your Nurse may hang up the Pincushion by the String to it, and for every good Action you do, a Pin shall be stuck on the Red Side, and for every bad Action a Pin shall be stuck on the Black Side…[when] you have got all the ten Pins on the Red Side, then I will send you a Penny…But if ever the Pins be all found on the Black Side of the Pincushion, then I will send a Rod, and you shall be whipt… The book and the pincushion that Jack has “sent” to the young reader, as well as the penny and the rod he promises to “send” later (presumably through the Nurse) form a set of apparatus for reading in which the book is only a part. The way A Little Pretty Pocket-Book outsources signification to other material objects around the book culminates, at the end of the century, in John Marshall’s miniature libraries. These were sets of miniature books packaged within ornate miniature bookshelves, with titles like Child’s Library, The Infant’s Library, and The Doll’s Library. Brian Alderson suggests, particularly with The Doll’s Library, that Marshall promoted these miniature books as accessories to the dolls and dollhouses children already owned, thereby “teaching the child by getting the child to teach the dolls”. So as well as containing narratives in their text, the material conformity and positioning of Marshall’s books relative to other objects allow them to take part in the it-narrative of the living doll, through which it might in turn more effectively deliver the moral lessons contained within its text.

Taken together, the otherwise highly dissimilar genres of the almanac and the children’s book demonstrate the amplifying effect of miniaturisation on a book’s materiality, as well as the manifold relationships that materiality can have to a book’s text. Alderson, Brian. “Miniature libraries for the young” The Private Library, 3rd series 6, 1983, 3-38. Boreman, Thomas. The Gigantick History of the Two Famous Giants, and Other Curiosities in Guildhall, London. London: Printed for Tho. Boreman, 1740. Brown, Kate E. "Beloved Objects: Mourning, Materiality, and Charlotte Bronte's "Never- Ending Story"." ELH 65.2 (1998): 395-421. Disraeli, Isaac. Curiosities of Literature: In Six Volumes. Vol. 2. London: Moxon, 1834. 37- 39. Laws, Emma. "Miniature Libraries from the Children's Books Collections." Victoria and Albert Museum. <http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/m/miniature-libraries/>. Roberts, Julian. "The 1765 Edition of "Goody Two-Shoes"" The British Museum Quarterly 29.3/4 (1965): 67-70. Stewart, Susan. "The Miniature." On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993. 37-69. Thwaite, M. F., and John Newbery. A Little Pretty Pocket-book. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967. Welsh, Doris V. The History of Miniature Books. Albany, NY: Fort Orange, 1987.