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Simon Garfield - In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World

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In Miniature: How Small Things Illuminate the World: summary, description and annotation

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Bestselling, award-winning writer Simon Garfield returns with an enthralling investigation of humans peculiar fascination with small thingsand what small things tell us about our larger world.

[Simon Garfield is] an exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite and delightful factoid. Sunday Times (London)

Simon Garfield writes books that shine a light on aspects of the everyday world in order to reveal the charms and eccentricities hiding in plain sight around us. After beguiling fans with books about everything from typography to time, from historic maps to the color mauve, hes found his most delightful topic yet: miniatures.

Tiny Eiffel Towers. Platoons of brave toy soldiers. A dolls house created for a Queen. Diminutive crime scenes crafted to catch a killer. Model villages and miniscule railways. These are just a few of the objects you will discover in the pages of *In Miniature. *

Bringing together history, psychology, art, and obsession, Garfield explores what fuels the strong appeal of miniature objects among collectors, modelers, and fans. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring on us a taste of adult-sized authority. For some, the desire to play with small things becomes a desire to make small things. We live in a vast and uncertain world, and controlling just a tiny, scaled-down part of it restores our sense of order and worth.

As it explores flea circuses, microscopic food, ancient tombs, and the Vegas Strip, In Miniature changes the way we perceive our surroundings, encouraging all of us to find greatness in the smallest of things.

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ALSO BY SIMON GARFIELD


Expensive Habits

The End of Innocence

The Wrestling

The Nations Favourite

Mauve

The Last Journey of William Huskisson

Our Hidden Lives (ed.)

We Are at War (ed.)

Private Battles (ed.)

The Error World

Mini

Exposure

Just My Type

On the Map

To the Letter

My Dear Bessie (ed.)

A Notable Woman (ed.)

Timekeepers

In Miniature How Small Things Illuminate the World - image 1

In Miniature How Small Things Illuminate the World - image 2

An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright 2018 by Simon Garfield

Originally published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Limited

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Atria Books hardcover edition March 2019

In Miniature How Small Things Illuminate the World - image 3 and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or .

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

Interior design by Laura Levatino

Jacket design by Peter Adlington

Endpapers Slinkachu

Author photograph Alan Trotter

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-5011-9958-5

ISBN 978-1-5011-9960-8 (ebook)

For Justine

By doing something a half centimeter high, you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try to do the whole sky.

A LBERTO G IACOMETTI

The only thing that gets better when it gets bigger is a penis.

G EORGE L OIS

A kingdom at her feet Princess Elizabeth at Bekonscot Model Village in the - photo 4

A kingdom at her feet. Princess Elizabeth at Bekonscot Model Village in the 1930s.

INTRODUCTION

THE ART OF SEEING

Not so long ago, bigness was the thing. A big pack was better value. The department store had more of everything, as did Texas. Encyclopaedia Britannica had all the knowledge and occupied one-sixth of all available living-room shelving.

Then small was beautiful. The toy poodle. The Mini. The boutique. Nouvelle cuisine. The exclusive club. The stacking chair.

And then, in the age of technology, even smaller was all: the microchip, the microwave oven, the in-ear headphone, one thousand songs in your pocket, the nanosecond, the slider.

A while after thatwhich brings us to nowthings are confusingly big again. The flat-screen television. The Airbus A380. The intractable size of our global economic and security dilemmas. Dwayne Johnson.

Size is one thing, but scale is another, and this book is about scale. It is specifically concerned with how the miniature world informs the world at large. At its heart it is a book about looking and about seeing; and with this may come elucidation. We bring things down to size to understand and appreciate them. Something too big to visualize at full scalea building perhaps, or a warmay be rendered comprehensible at 1:12. Artistssculptors, set designers, poetswork in miniature because it encourages greater scrutiny and deeper participation, and I hope this book will do the same.

This is also a book about pleasure and visiona celebration. Miniature items help us imagine grander schemes. A signal box on a model railway is eyed with needling precision and with the care we would seldom apportion to one at full size. Before we landed on the moon, at least one NASA scientist clung for inspiration, through difficult times, to the marionettes and rockets on the British television series Thunderbirds . Architects of future cities must first scheme in model form, and the model may be the only proof that they attempted such a thing.

Of all the miniature things well encounter in the following pages, not all of them will be small. The miniature railway in Hamburg prides itself on being the biggest in the world. The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, with its fully workable gondola rides for the romantically obtuse, sleeps four thousand. But everything here will be miniature in scale compared to the thing its a miniature of.

The word miniature derives from the world of books, but it was popularized by the world of art. Before the printing press, when books were written by scribes and illustrated by hand, the word evolved from the Italian word miniatura , which itself derived from the Latin miniare , to color with red lead. There were very few uses of miniature before the sixteenth century, when the word became associated with illumination in general, and became frequently interchangeable with limning or the painting of small portraits. Thereafter, anything small was referred to as miniature, and the word entered common usage from about 1630. The development of both miniature books and miniature portraits will be examined in later chapters, and both will confirm that it is only with close scrutiny that we may uncover secrets within.

To distinguish between the miniature and the merely small, I have adopted a simple qualifier: a miniature must be a reduced version of something that was originally bigger, or led to something bigger, and it should be consciously created as such. It may also perform a miniature dutyexplain a concept, solve a puzzle, jog a memory. A souvenir of a building on a key ring, though not very interesting, fits the bill. As does a miniature bottle of gin. A Volkswagen Beetle does not, and nor does an ever-so-small thimble, no matter how keen are those who collect them. Minibars and lapdogs are borderline, as is the art of bonsai cultivation, in which small is created by purposeful pruning and potting. A toy poodle made of plastic in a classroom tableau made by five-year-olds is of no interest to anyone. One could create further rules, and dictate dimensions the way an airline dictates the carry-on, but it will soon become clear that miniatures occupy a significant enough space in our world to create their own instinctual presence: youll know one if you see one, and after a while you may see nothing else.

The miniature world embraces control. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring the potency of adults, and possibly giants. Toy cars and dolls and plastic construction kits are not merely pliable in our hands; they render us conquerors. We may never have such dominion over the world again, unless we continue the play into adulthood. Those men with their train drivers caps and their tiny models in sheds and attics! Their wives long gone! And their wives with their own china madnesses, their little toy families, their smooth hedgehog collections, their treasured things in felt. Who will speak for them? The creation of small universes in which we may bury ourselves to the exclusion of all else will be at the core of this book. The people crouching over tiny details as if the world depended on it are only doing it because their world does depend on it.

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