#del prado

[lots-of-little-books]

Can we please see your bookshelf/ whole collection of mini books??

But of course!

I have about 280 miniature books- there's a margin of error on that depending on your definition of "miniature" and "book". I keep most of them scattered on my regular-sized bookshelf, in front of my regular books, but I store ~90 of them in this craft box/miniature bookshelf I made:

(The owl's name is Archimedes. He does his best.)

Another 101 of my books are from that one Del Prado series:

And here's most of what's left!

(For scale, the biggest book here is 5 inches tall, the smallest is 2 inches, and most are near 3 inches.)

[lots-of-little-books]

A 2 1/2 inch tall edition of The Sorrows of Young Wether, by Goethe. Part of the 2003 deal Prado miniature series.

I realize in hindsight that the scale isn’t clear here, but I assure you it is Quite Small.

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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in two miniature editions. One is a three volume, 2 inch tall set in English from Del Prado, and the other is a 5 inch copy that contains the entirety of it in the original Italian. A friend of my got it for me awhile back while traveling in Florence, where Dante once lived.

Editions like these are partly why I love miniature books so much. It’s the entire Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of the Western canon, and it fits in the palm of you hand. The miniaturization of classic epics like this is a whole thing- supposedly the phrase “in a nutshell” came about when Pliny described an edition of The Iliad small enough to fit in a literal nutshell. I’ve been trying to find miniatures of other epics, we’ll have to see if I ever encounter one quite THAT small.

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A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. This edition is 2 1/2 inches tall, published by Del Prado in 2003.

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Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Lilliput, by Jonathan Swift. At 2 1/2 inches tall, it was published by Del Prado in 2003. It’s an especially fitting edition, nicely scaled for the Lilliputian reader.

I also pictured it next to my Franklin Library edition of the book for scale. Awhile back I found this great set of two parts of Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Lilliput and A Voyage to Brobdingnag (a land of giants), where the Lilliput one is a miniature book and the Brobdingnag one is an elephant folio. I just thought it was a neat idea and wanted to replicate the sentiment.

[lots-of-little-books]

Well, you folks really seemed to like the post I made about Poe, so I thought I’d also share my other miniature books by Poe. These are visually less interesting, but they’re both great editions.

The 2003 Del Prado edition of The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories has 15 full short stories by Poe. It’s 2 1/2 inches tall, 1 inch wide, and 640 pages long.

“The Gold Bug”, on the other hand, is a single short story put out by the Little Leather Library ca. 1930, 4 inches tall. The Little Leather Library put out over 100 short stories, poetry collections, and plays, but I have yet to find a complete list of everything they published. I do know they also have Poe’s “The Raven and Other Poems” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, though. This particular short story is actually not that spooky- it’s a treasure hunting story that introduces some basic elements of ciphers. Cool!

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The Selected Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, 2 1/2 inches tall, published by Del Prado in 2003. E. T. A. Hoffman was an early German gothic fiction writer. Some of his stories would inspire the opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” by Jacques Offenbach. Two of those stories are included in this edition, “The Sand-Man” and “The Cremona Violin”, along with “The Deserted House” and “The History of Krakatuk”. Hoffmann is also know for writing “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, on which Tchaikovsky’s ballet is based.

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It was a dark and windy September night. Then suddenly, before anyone could see it coming, the minute hand ticked from 11:59 to 00:00, and October flickered into being, grinning madly.

Merry October, everyone! This is the month of Spooky Miniature Books, starting with Del Prado’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 2003 at 2 1/2 inches tall, this edition presents Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella about a doctor with a Terrible Secret and a strange man that happens to be terrorizing the streets at night. Oddly enough, no one has ever seen them in the same room together- a coincidence, I’m sure.