My wife and I are gluing. The best way is to squirt a glob onto a piece of paper, then use a toothpick to tack a few drops onto the edge of whatever you’re gluing—a wall, a shelf, a book. Do this all along the edge, then hold the pieces together tightly for just a minute or so. Use tweezers if one of the pieces is very small, like the tiny bracket that will support the wire to the light above the bookcase beneath the second-floor walkway. I learned this technique watching a convention of miniaturists make things—tiny Christmas trees, tiny roses, tiny cupcakes, even tiny martinis with toothbrush bristles for swizzles.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. That was in a hotel near Philadelphia at Miniaturia, a gathering of hundreds of miniaturists buying, selling, and making things together. In a short time, I’ve learned a lot about gluing and a lot about concentration. June and I have something on the TV, but we barely watch. I’m focused on assembling this miniature bookshop—railings, stairway, furniture, shelves—and June is patiently gluing the tiny covers on about a hundred tiny books, which eventually we will place, one by one, onto the shelves. I haven’t concentrated like this for decades.
Not even just concentrating: there’s a focus, a fugue state, a loss of time. Every detail—a painting glued to the wall, a piece of shelf molding constructed—I show to June, and we gaze longingly. The tiny bookshop does not yet exist, yet we want to be inside it.
But again: I’m ahead of myself. Philadelphia, the miniature bookshop at home, the hit “Best in Miniatures” show on CBC (its third season aired is due out this fall) were all far in the future when this started for me with an email. But really, it all started with a roombox.
“I am a miniaturist/artist and have just completed my rendition of what Sir Francis Beaufort’s study may have looked like in England around 1800,” the email read. “The inspiration for the roombox that I created was your book Defining the Wind. I loved the book. I am writing to ask…”
He included pictures. A well-appointed library with rich wooden walls, a work table, an armchair. Shelves full of books; a ladder to get to the high ones. A nice library, but I have seen nice libraries. Then I went back to his status: miniaturist.
I was corresponding with Robert Off, who turns out to inhabit the highest stratum of working miniaturists. I looked more closely at the photographs of the 1:12-scale library. I saw the little tufted leather chair, the table, the portrait of Beaufort over the fireplace, and I was charmed. I later traveled to Cincinnati for its unveiling. In the Mercantile Library, a private library every bit as atmospheric as Off’s conception of Beaufort’s, Off spoke about miniatures and I spoke about Beaufort. The few dozen people attending politely listened about Beaufort, but they were there to see the roombox. Off and I took a picture in front of it.
A roombox is in one sense a very fancy diorama, though Off distinguishes further. A diorama illustrates, he says; a roombox dramatizes: “They both tell a story, but the roombox tells the story more artistically.” Instead of a shoebox, it’s in a finished wooden box, commonly two feet wide, a foot tall and deep, as Off’s was. Like most, Off’s finished wooden box had a glass front, because the contents are delicate and usually expensive. The miniature library was a room with a rich wood floor made of individual finished slats; on that floor a tiny Oriental rug, not printed but woven. Hundreds of little individually bound books; one sat on a side table, with a pair of tiny spectacles casually laid down as though its reader had just stood up and left the room, perhaps for a glass of sherry. Two windows, out of which, if you looked from different angles, you saw different aspects of the surrounding city. Tiny oil lamps—in sconces and on tables—from which tinier lights shone. I was enraptured. The pictures I filled my phone with, lacking external objects for scale, could not be distinguished from pictures I might have taken in a stately home.
Off put me up in his lovely home, where he showed me his extensive collection of miniatures—he displays hundreds, his own and others’—and his workshop, including roomboxes in progress and their designs, graph paper full of angles and perspectives and points of view. The next day we planned to visit a nearby museum of miniatures and delve deeper into his workshop. Instead I awoke with an inner ear thing, spent the day vomiting in his bathroom, and flew home.
The missed visits kindled a fire within me. First, I wanted to understand the motivations and practices of what was clearly a vast and complex culture. Miniatures draw us in in a way no other artistic expression does. Think of Alice, kneeling in that long hallway in Wonderland, peering through the tiny door into the miniature garden: “How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers.” I felt that longing. We all feel it.
I briefly interested but soon bored my friends talking about miniatures. I looked them up and learned about the Thorne Rooms, 68 rooms ranging from a Gothic church to a modern house, some of the most popular exhibits at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then I stumbled onto an Instagram account of miniatures, which led to more Instagram miniaturists. Reddit, too. At this time of writing, TikTok miniaturist Felipe Miranda (@Miniaturemodelmaking) has 2.4 million followers, and his video making a tiny guitar video has 4.1 million views. The hashtag “miniatures” has 2.6 billion views. Look to buy and you can find tiny plastic gumball machine-style miniatures for pennies, or full, intricate roomboxes valued at $100,000 and up. Finally I discovered Best in Miniatures, a 2022 CBC series that pitted eleven miniaturists against one another, solving design challenges. With the show, I knew I was right: something was going on. Miniatures were a thing, officially; they were having a moment. I wanted to understand it.
I sent an email. Bob Off invited me back to Cincinnati.
In his condo overlooking the Ohio River, I dined with Off, his wife, and some friends. We planned to visit the nearby miniatures museum that we had missed on my first trip and to visit some collectors he knew and see more of his work—including the Beaufort library roombox—in situ.
There is nothing Off doesn’t know about miniatures, and nobody making miniatures he does not know. After dinner, he and I wandered his condo, which functions almost as a small museum. You won’t see memorabilia from his long career in commercial real estate, but he has actual galleries of miniatures. His front hall holds three of his roomboxes, mounted on shelves, and I discovered that his Beaufort box was far from alone in its quasi-historical bent. One in his hallway depicts the work tent of western photographer Edward Curtis; another called “Afternoon Light at Croft Hall” has, Off said, the goal “to capture the beautiful and intense afternoon light as it floods into an English library.” Above the roomboxes are glass shelves of the furniture miniatures Off collects and sometimes makes, displayed beneath recessed lighting as if in a jewelry store. Backing up to that entranceway is a study with further shelves of miniatures and more roomboxes (the room in which Henry II imprisoned Eleanor of Aquitaine; Off’s notion of Winslow Homer’s studio in Maine).
I found myself focusing on why. When Off was a child, his mother contracted polio and was sent away; his father often left to visit her. Left by himself an enormous amount, Off began casting and painting lead soldiers. He looked now at these miniatures—Homer’s solitary studio, the room where Eleanor endured sixteen years of solitude. “For some reason, my boxes tend to be about lonely people,” he told me.
He built the bench and chair in Eleanor’s room, though his own work focuses mostly on design and architecture rather than furniture: he cuts wood into tiny strips, assembles a floor, and finishes it; then he designs complex patterns of wainscoting and molding, along with miniature walls and bookshelves. The furniture he mostly acquires from other artisans, then assembles within the rooms. But he is a member of IGMA, the International Guild of Miniature Artisans (the highest-level organization of miniature artisans, with around a thousand members), and he attends workshops where he’s learned to make the miniature dovetail joints and working drawers that turn his hall gallery into a place of astonishment, with secretaries and high boys with tiny brass hinges and drawer pulls (and secret drawers), woven chairs and shaker benches with finished and waxed spindles barely thicker than toothpicks. One of his prizes is a fully operational engineer’s toolbox. The box is shorter than your thumb, and it’s filled with individually crafted tools that actually work. The drills drill, the locks work, the calipers squeeze.
The next morning, Off drove me to the Kathleen Savage Browning Miniatures Collection, a small museum in nearby Maysville, Kentucky that he calls the best miniatures museum in the world. Browning guided us through the museum herself, showing off millions of dollars’ worth of the finest miniatures imaginable. She fell into miniatures when her daughters were toddlers and she read them a book. “I turned a page and I just about lost it,” she recalled. It was an alphabet book, and on the Q page was a drawing: “It was my bed, and my quilt that I’d slept in as a child. And I went, ‘Oh, I have to have this!’” Her then-husband took the walnut butt of an old army rifle, cut it into strips, turned them on a miniature lathe, and built Browning her childhood bed in 1:12 dollhouse scale.
Browning was hooked. Remarried and not hurting for money, she was able to spend her life learning to both craft and buy miniatures; like Off, she creates environments and furnishes them. Her museum contains entire houses with rooms in different styles, from Second Empire to colonial, including a couple of Off’s own pieces (purchased through a gallery for tens of thousands of dollars each).
Browning walked me through her museum and narrated: “This is a story,” she said, and every one of the thousands of pieces—millions of dollars’ worth of miniatures—had one. Sure, there are the fancy home miniatures you’d expect, including Spencer House, Princess Diana’s ancestral home; a tiny playable cello; and miniature silver that needs polishing. But far more fascinating were creations from her own life, often made for her by the finest craftspeople. The theater from her hometown, each of the 11,000 bricks in its walls hand-made from actual bricks; under one seat, where she used to sit, is the amethyst ring she lost there as a child. Here is a house, each room in a different style representing a different moment in her life. “The beauty of miniatures,” she said, “is that I can live in any house I want to live in.”
Back in Cincinnati, Off showed me his workshop, filled with sheets of balsa, the tiniest dowels imaginable, and a table saw the size of an ink-jet printer. Drawers full of the kind of things he puts in his roomboxes: a tray of fruits and flowers; a box of little lamps, with shades the sizes of postage stamps; a skelter of trunks, tables, and other furniture that looked like an entire attic of chaos all stuffed into a single plastic drawer.
He also had books about stage design. Off sees his works as a species of stagecraft. He returned to miniatures as an adult because his wife admired the Thorne rooms in Chicago, so he threw a tarp over the pool table, bought some materials, and got down to work. He quickly realized that the room felt static if it was just stuff. He’s not just making a copy, down to the finest detail: he’s creating an illusion, a drama. That sense of being drawn in, of being pulled into an entire little world, like Alice looking through that keyhole, is something he actively pursues.
For example, every one of his roomboxes has a hallway leading away, a window through which a landscape can be glimpsed, a door partway open that leads into another room. Of course, he makes sure that every view lands on continued artwork—you never look through a door and see the wallpaper end in another room, or the wire leading to the LED that lights it; instead, you see the other room, in a way that makes you confident that if you walked all the way in, the entire room would be full of furniture and window treatments and paintings and bric a brac, and presumably a group of people playing cards at a table, who would look up and greet you. You’re not even looking at an illusion: you’re glimpsing a miniature reality. That sense that the other room fully exists is essential to the relationship between the viewer and the miniature.
This is what distinguishes miniatures: this sense that just offstage, there’s more going on if you could just get small enough to walk through that little doorway. That’s what I was looking to understand. Then Off told me something.
“I put things in drawers,” he said. “In my rooms.” Those roomboxes are behind glass. But if Off includes a table in a roombox, and that table has a drawer, well: something will be in that drawer. Pencils, a sewing kit, tools, cutlery. Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever know it’s there, yet putting it in there is an essential part of what Off is doing. It’s about a story. “My whole life,” he said, whether creating roomboxes or connecting with clients to sell real estate, “has been about the story.”
Off drove me to several collectors he wanted me to meet, and that was about the story, too. By far the most touching experience I had was meeting collector Phil Long—whose house is full of the miniature antique silver in which his collection specializes—and his delightful wife, Whitney, who was beginning to suffer from dementia. Off had told me that miniatures help give people with dementia a calm space, a place where they can reconnect with the familiar. “When they look at these miniatures, it takes them to a different place,” he said. “A place they can control.” Off told me how many of his customers have parents or partners with dementia or children with Down syndrome: people who may become lost, unreachable, in anxiety and confusion. In their rooms, their families will place a room box, and there the child or parent can find focus, relief, peace.
Phil Long told me about the box he and Off created for Whitney. A quiet, peaceful living room not unlike their own, it has a portrait of Whitney’s great grandfather hanging above the fireplace; the view out the window replicates the view from their Cape Cod house. “There’s a bookcase in it with a lot of books she loves to read,” Phil said. “There’s a child’s highchair, which represents the generations in the family going forward.” A cane settee represents the furniture a clipper ship captain would have had, and a painting of a clipper ship (visible, of course, through a doorway into another room) reminds her of her family’s shipping business. “She sits in her chair and sees that,” Phil said quietly. “And it’s nice.” When I met her, Whitney was almost heartbreakingly lovely, apologetic when she lost track of a conversation, but radiant with kindness. Moment by moment, her story is slipping away from her, and Off has given her a place where she can return to it.
“Objects are emotions,” Off quoted the artist Tom Boucher as saying. “I call them trigger points in my boxes. Everything is there for a reason. I want people to imagine themselves in this box, in this space.” He also quoted the stage designer Robert Edmond Jones: “It is in the arrangement of a chair that the magic lies.” A miniature draws you in the same way your neighbor’s window, illuminated across the street, calls to you at night. You see only a well-lit interior, but the open book, the cup and saucer, the chair moved back from the table radiate the sense that someone lives there, someone utterly not you.
In fact, the fully realized nature of these rooms draws attention to one central fact: they are never populated. No figure ever shows up, no mannequin, no doll. This is the general rule for almost all miniaturists. For one thing, Off said, even the most intricate doll simply cannot look as real as the furnishings and will utterly destroy the illusion. But more importantly, the lack of figure in the roombox makes space for the viewer.
“They’ve all just stepped out,” said my friend Haven Kimmel, a writer and also a miniaturist, about how she wants a viewer to experience one of her little sitting rooms or studies. The people working at the desk or sitting in the chair just left to make tea or get warmer socks. You should be able to almost see the wisp of smoke rising from the cigarette they left in the ashtray, and feel like you could simply sit down and the seat cushion would still be warm. Or take it from Emma Waddell, one of the judges on Best in Miniatures. “The reason I had no dolls in it,” she said of her life-changing childhood dollhouse, “is because I lived in it.”
Growing up in a London council flat, Waddell had a childhood of stepping over the drunk and desolate as she made her way to school, dealing with the chaos that travels with poverty. Drug dealers had the flat to one side of her; to the other, she heard the father beating the children through thin walls. When she was ten, she was given a little wooden doll house that she not only arranged like her own house; she took samples of her mother’s cleaning supplies to care for it. “I used to polish the floors, polish the furniture, and it was pristine,” she said. “There were no drunks living on the stairs, no urine on the stairs. It smelled of polish and beeswax and I just opened the lid and I lived in that house and nothing could hurt me.”
Waddell escaped into a miniature in much the same way that Whitney Long found refuge from the growing uncertainty of her mind. The same way young Bob Off escaped from loneliness into his lead soldiers. In fact, Waddell then escaped from a boring life as a banker into miniatures. A lifetime of indulging her love for her doll house—and others—led to a visit to a dollhouse collectors’ convention. Uninterested in selling, she offered the services of finishing, design, or restoration of the miniature houses of others. A few quick commissions led her to leave banking and become well known enough as a doll house designer that she became a judge on Best in Miniatures. Waddell believes the pandemic is what finally pushed miniatures into the center of our cultural conversation. (Statistics bear her out; according to miniatures.com, before 2020 miniature sales were trending downwards up to 15% annually; in 2020, sales improved by 50%.) To be sure, the miniature environment offers great comfort as a place to escape rampant disease, to say nothing of a world beset by climate change and nascent fascism. But she also sees the growth in miniatures as a simple outcome of people stuck at home and bored. “Lockdown is what made it explode,” she said.
Well, lockdown and TikTok, according to Darren Scala of D. Thomas Fine Miniatures, which skews toward Off-level fine-art miniatures, boasting more than 130,000 Instagram followers and a YouTube channel that features interviews with miniature artisans. According to Scala, the explosion started before COVID on Reddit, Pinterest, and especially Instagram, where miniaturists can share images of their work, teach and inspire one another, and swoon. Miniatures “allow you to see objects in a different way,” he said. “It makes you sort of super focus, takes you away from yourself and makes you feel something.” That illusion, the sense of elsewhere: “the illusion that there is something behind that door.” You can do that in a painting or a full-size sculpture, but it’s not the same. With a miniature, “You have to go like this,” he said, craning. “You have to move to get the treat, and then, you know. You have the possibility.” And while Scala shows off mostly higher-end miniatures—“fine” miniatures in the argot, the artisanal furniture and objects that run in the hundreds of dollars per piece—once you’re online, you’ll find that as miniatures have spread, so has their subject matter. A decade ago, the focus was stately homes. Not anymore.
“This industry has been focused on people who are retired, have spare time, and have a steady income. And so a lot of those people didn't know anything better than Victorian. And so that was what you usually saw,” said Cathy Miller-Vaughn, who runs the Philadelphia Miniaturia show, a convention at a suburban hotel where I went to finally immerse myself. It’s a NAME convention —National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts, a more hobbyist-friendly level than IGMA, which caters more to fine artists. We sat on lobby couches while that exact age group lined up to enter the Thursday-night craft night, short silver haircuts very much in evidence. But more than a few men entered—and plenty of people under 40, too.
“Especially since COVID,” Miller-Vaughn continued. “And the lockdowns. People went home and they were like, ‘You know what, I don't really like this Victorian, I'm going to redo it. And I'm going to make it like my own living room.’ And then this entire explosion of modern miniatures came about. It was amazing. And then they figured out that they could use scrap paper as wallpaper, and they figured out that they could use popsicle sticks from the dollar store for flooring, and you could paint them. And they started looking for other things and other people, and then there was this whole connection that happened mostly over Instagram—and TikTok, as well. And they all started to talk to each other, share ideas, share pictures, and it just started to snowball over and over again.” Essentially, what we’ve called the maker movement found miniatures, and it’s been a very happy connection. (Miniatures.com statistics bear this out too; their biggest gains from 2014 to 2022 came from shoppers between 18 to 24 and 35 to 44.)
Makers were all over Miniaturia. I visited the classes, where people produced tiny artists’ studios and flower carts, learned to paint with minuscule paint brushes, learned to work with 3D printers, and debated whether such printers were a good thing or a cheat. And wherever you sat, while the table might be dominated by retired ladies (“It was cheaper than therapy or a divorce,” one woman laughed when asked what miniatures brought her), younger people had clearly joined the club. I made a tiny Christmas tree in a little bell jar and found myself sitting next to Andi Vinciquerra, a thirty-something civil servant from Queens. “I make offbeat miniatures,” she told me.
When I visited her table in the showroom the next day, she showed me her miniature of Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator. Her story had almost every element of a maker miniature story: as a child, she was not allowed to play with a standard Victorian miniature house her mom owned, but she fantasized about it. Many years later, she attended a show thrown by Darren Scala called "Causing a Little Trouble," filled with the offbeat: dirty public restrooms; skulls and decayed food; tiny sex toys and drug paraphernalia. Vinciquerra was home. Scala told her, “Just get some air dry clay and try it.”
On her table at Miniaturia, she displayed a series of bulletin boards covered with yarn and pictures. “I did the conspiracy theorist shed,” she said. “Kind of a commentary on the QAnon and anti-vax deniers. When things were really bad, it was a cool way to control that.” Surrounded by conspiracy theorists putting her culture and her planet at risk, she squeezed all that madness into a 1:144 little box; there, she was in charge. “That scene, you set the climate for your own stuff,” she told me. She had a series of waterlogged bureaus, covered with moss and fungus, that are part of an abandoned beach house she’s working on. She had tiny books, but far from the leatherbound tomes of Bob Off’s rendition of Beaufort’s study, these were creased paperbacks with tiny Post-Its and dog-eared pages.
By the time I walked into the full showroom at Miniaturia, it was, finally, the wave crashing over my head. Months of talking to miniaturists and thinking about miniatures, a day of making my own, and still I was not prepared. The main show took over the entire ballroom and hallways along it. Stand in a hallway, look around, and be stunned. Rows of the intricate silver I’d seen in Phil Long’s house, alongside copper cookware and, on a rotating rack of food, what I heard a collector call “the best fucking potatoes you will ever see.” Entire areas dedicated to lighting, from crystal chandeliers to Tiffany lamps. Modern furniture, roombox frames, classic works of art, flickering fireplaces, bowls of won ton soup. Tiny bottles of liquor and tiny glassware to pour it in.
Vinciquerra’s table of odd miniatures resided on a row of offbeat works on the edge of the large room at Miniaturia, but the entire show had what you might call the New Miniatures—odd, nontraditional, often ironic, subjects—running through it as a theme. I saw a beat-up metal-rail bedframe supporting a stained, soiled mattress with bedsprings poking through. I saw rows of plates as if on a kitchen display shelf. Then I got into a conversation with Maria-Teresa Allaire, whom I’d met in one of the classes; she showed me pictures of her own work, also in plates. Interested in miniature food and the ritual of the last meal, she creates “miniaturized versions of the last meals of death row prisoners” and is currently halfway through a set of one hundred last meals of executed people of color. I saw a model of 221b Baker Street so detailed that artist James Ferranti says he does more than put in dust and stray coins: “I dirty the walls; nothing’s ever clean. People said to me, ‘I could smell the tobacco when I look at this.’” And then across the hall was a miniature of the entire set of the sitcom Frasier.
I spent quite awhile agog at the miniatures of Itty Bitty Mini Mart from Chicago. Margie Criner runs a shop where a half-dozen workers make miniatures of mid-century appliances: Fender amps, Marantz turntables, Panasonic tape recorders, and more. Her pieces populate not only her own sculptures, but the roomboxes—or the bookshelves—of people who still yearn for the speakers that stood in the corners of their college dorm rooms.
Whether it’s for a Victorian life we never lived or the cinderblock life we have, miniatures spark nostalgia. Broadening the subject matter changes nothing. Bob Off may spend hours on the placement of a tiny paintbrush or the quality of light in a garden; Emma Waddell can disappear into the redesign of a client’s entire miniature house, down to the level of the floorwax. Just so, Margie Criner wanted to reproduce the connection between the handset to that pale blue touch-tone phone with the giant numbers that we all had in the 1970s. ”I had to find the right material to make a phone cord,” she told me. “That’s the right girth, and the most believable, and to have it loose and be able to wrap around itself and behave similarly.”
Well, what is it? She laughed and cringed. “It’s a thread that I dyed, wet, wound, and heated, and then it worked. That’s a ridiculous day of work.”
The hit of the show, and a piece that has since won awards, was “Hoarder’s Front Porch,” by Amanda Kelly, a graduate student artist who focuses on compulsive hoarding disorder. From the beer cans and overflowing ashtrays to the piles of mail and newspapers, the piece embodies the mountain of stuff that threatens to overwhelm us. “A lot of people call my artwork cute,” she told me. “Then they look at it closer, and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s a litter box full of poop. That’s not cute; it has a meaning behind it.” Her work faces that overwhelming mountain of stuff, and by miniaturizing it, she gave us—or gave at least herself —a moment’s opportunity to control it. Kelly is all over Instagram and TikTok with tutorials, current work (a series of miniature trash bags, last I checked), and half a million followers; she’s now participating in Bite Size, a competition series on TikTok (first episode here!).
Social media, check; control of a terrifying world, check. Kelly completed the miniatures trifecta by creating “Unprecedented Times,” in which she stared directly at the pandemic lockdown and created your exact bedroom. Well, hers, but yours and mine too: the unmade bed; the laptop and phone just waiting for you to spill something on them; bedside tables covered with kleenexes, food, crap. Did you need the crumpled water bottles and the overflowing laundry basket to feel seen? You are seen. The miniaturist sees everything. Said Kelly, when you make a miniature, “It comes from a place of control. It’s almost like you’re a god.”
Talking to Kelly and Criner harkened back to Bob Off and the things he put in the drawers of the furniture in his roomboxes. When Criner gave me a Viewmaster that the Itty Bitty Mini Mart made, of course I raved about the tiny disc of images, especially the fact that it came in and out of the Viewmaster—and had actual little pieces of film in each of the image holes that a tiny viewer would see through the Viewmaster. Criner intensified that delight when she told me the little pieces of film came from the actual Super8 movies her own father took of her family as a child. Nobody would ever know that; nobody needs to know it for the Viewmaster to inspire delight. But it being there, the intention it represents, somehow inhabits the object.
I left Miniaturia with: a tiny martini, two tiny cupcakes, and a Christmas tree in a tiny bell jar, all of which I made; a little bottle of lotion, part of the goodie bag; a ceramic jug the size of your thumbnail, given by a sculptor who told me she uses a regular throwing wheel but just leans in real close. And Criner’s Viewmaster, populated by pictures of Criner’s own life. And souvenirs for my family: for June, a kit to make a set of decorative tins; for the kids, tiny papers and books. I had hoped to leave with a miniature of my own book that had inspired Off in the first place. Belinda McWilliams, from South Africa, told me she could whip one up, but it was a busy weekend.
June and I worked on that book nook pretty much nonstop for an entire weekend, spreading out all over the coffee table. It’s a kit—there wasn’t much creative work we had to do—but putting the books in, artfully stacked, some open, some leaning, each with a tiny little toothpick point of glue, was joyful. Above a little mantlepiece a mirror reflects an opposite wall of books, and best of all, an archway leads to a stairway, the first steps curving up and away into … wherever. That magical space beyond, that certainly exists. When my oldest saw the book nook, he raced upstairs and brought down the miniature book I’d brought him, tooled leather binding around some of Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches. He lay it on one of the bookstore tables, and I secured it with a dab of mounting putty. It felt delicious, and I thought that was the end. Then one day my phone rang.
It was Belinda McWilliams calling from South Africa; she needed my mailing address. When the package arrived, it included not just a miniature paged copy of Defining the Wind. Two copies of that, of course—in hardback and paperback—but also copies of every book I’d ever published or contributed to. A couple dozen tiny versions of my own books. As a tribute to Off, I put a copy of Defining on the table next to the little da Vinci I had brought for my son.
You can analyze something like this endlessly, but I think ultimately, in these days of madness, the explosion into miniatures comes because a miniature world is a world where anything is still possible. In a world that seems interested only in telling people no, miniature worlds answer yes. Can you put a Louis XIV room next to a midcentury modern room? Yes, you can.
It’s control, or the illusion of control. It’s the human process: you address something external to you, you reorient it to advance the idea, and you re-express it. Then someone else comes along and takes it to the next step. You distill it. You take its measurements and scale it down to where it's small enough to work with, to manage, to control. To where it’s understandable; to where it’s something you can take inside yourself. It hints at the biggest ideas, then makes them small.
To where you could hold them in the palm of your hand.
The author of seven books of nonfiction, Scott Huler has written for such newspapers as the New York Times and the Washington Post, and magazines like ESPN and Backpacker. His radio work has been heard on "All Things Considered" and "Day to Day" on NPR, and on "Marketplace" and "Splendid Table" on American Public Media. He was 2011 Piedmont Laureate in creative nonfiction, and he lives in Raleigh, NC, with his family. His website is scotthuler.com.
