Impressively Tiny Books by Bronte Siblings

“About 20 of these texts took the form of handsewn miniature books two inches tall. Harvard’s Houghton Library has nine of them, given by the poet Amy Lowell. The fragile volumes have just been treated to a painstaking team effort at the library to preserve and protect them.”

Read more at the Harvard Magazine

“It’s hard to imagine tweens today making these books, unless we started forcing them to take needlepoint classes, which apparently did wonders for dexterity, and took away their Hulu.”

Read more at the Hairpin

Grace White’s Delightful Miniatures

North Carolina, U.S. artist, Grace White, makes miniatures for scale models to be looked at, admired and gently played with. The tiny replicas are all so charming, but the little books stole my heart.

“I’ve learned about historic book structures and styles from colleagues who are book conservators (I myself am a paper conservator in a library), and those beautiful old books are what I wanted to duplicate for my historic miniature scenes. And although I love miniature books (real ones that open and have pages), I dislike the way they look in dollhouse scenes because they won’t stay closed, and so they tend to look awkward. So my books came about because I wanted books that would look realistic and beautiful and old, but that wouldn’t draw attention to themselves by behaving inappropriately.”

Images and quotes used with the permission of the artist. You can see more of her miniature books and the furniture that they fit into, here on her Flickr photostream.