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

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

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.