Another miniature that fits in a matchbox—this tiny handmade matchbox contains Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, illustrated and much abridged. Most of the illustrations are by Hugh Thomson, from a version of Pride and Prejudice published in 1894. I’ve rearranged them, added bits of background scenery and wrote the abridged story.
The book is 1-3/8″ x 2″. The matchbox is 1-1/2″ x 2-1/8″. There are 9 spreads. See more here.
The website Limp Vellum shows off bindings from the British Library Catalog. These bindings were “offered at a cheaper price than the familiar full-leather options, and … were often created to serve a temporary purpose, designed to be easily replaced.” The introduction goes on to say:… a young book conservator helping to assess the damage done by the Florence flood to the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in 1966, noted that limp vellum bindings, text blocks laced into folded vellum covers, had not only survived the flood with more success than traditional leather-over-boards structures, but that even before the disaster they seemed to have been better protecting their text blocks.
See more here.
I recently read Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. It’s about the little sister of Benjamin Franklin and compares her life to his. Writing a biography of an obscure person is hard, especially when most of her letters to her brother are lost. (Lepore ssays “In writing this book I have had to stare down a truishm: the lives of the obscure make good fiction but bad history.”) So Lepore fills in with lots of stories about life in Boston, where Jane lived, and the period leading up to the Revolutionary War. As Benjamin was one of the best known printers in the colonies, it’s also the story of early printing and publishing in the British North America. And finally it’s partly a story of letter writing and spelling. Jane could read, but her spelling was mostly phonetic. Jane’s life was hard (twelve children, most of them didn’t live past 30, and 2 went insane), but she’s feisty and opinionated and awfully good company.
Another miniature book that fits in a matchbox. This one includes a little book with fun facts about the ampersand and a wooden ampersand attached to the bottom of the box. Along the bottom of the book pages are examples of beautiful ampersands. And you can unfold it to reveal the timeline evolution of the glyph. See more here.
This book, Once by Lisa Hasegawa, contains 3 stories, all beginning with the line “once there was a boy…”. I like that she’s sewn them all into a wrap-around cover that joins them together, both thematically and structurally. You can see more of her work on her website or her etsy shop.
The monthly word for my prompt challenge group is
caboodle: noun (Informal) :the lot, pack, or crowd. Syn: assemblage
Suzanne, who’s in the group, has been encouraging me to get away from using the computer to do my design work, so I decided to concentrate on the synonym, assemblage. This reminded me immediately of the black sculptures of Louise Nevelson—they fascinated me as a kid and I have a postcard of her work tacked up on my bulletin board from an exhibit I went to a few years ago. Since I’ve been working in miniature with my matchbox books, I did a little homage to Nevelson—all hand-cut paper and messy glue stick.
Not quite done with the word, I also made a matchbox-sized book of color study collages around the Ornette Coleman quote “one must zig zag unless there is a circle”
