Vintage canada edition, 1998 Copyright 1996 by Alberto Manguel

EnclosedFlower-Garden, written in Holland in 1673 and measuring one-third inch by one-half inch,
smaller than an ordinary postage stamp; John James Audubon’s elephant-folio Birds of America, published
between 1827 and 1838, leaving its author to die impoverished, alone and insane; the companion volumes
of Brobdingnagian and Lilliputian sizes of Gulliver’s Travels designed by Bruce Rogers for the Limited
Editions Club of New York in 1950 — none of these has lasted except as a curiosity. But the essential
shapes — those which allow readers to feel the physical weight of knowledge, the splendour of vast
illustrations or the pleasure of being able to carry a book along on a walk or into bed — those remain.
A seventeenth-century Dutch woman portrayed by Bartholomeus van der Helst, holding an undersized
volume in her right hand. (photo credit 9.17)

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Books as visual puns: a 1950 edition of Gulliver’s Travels. (photo credit 9.18)
In the mid-1980s, an international group of North American archeologists excavating the huge Dakhleh
Oasis in the Sahara found, in the corner of a single-storey addition to a fourth-century house, two
complete books. One was an early manuscript of three political essays by the Athenian philosopher
Isocrates; the other was a four-year record of the financial transactions of a local estate steward. This
accounts book is the earliest complete example we have of a codex, or bound volume, and it is much like
our paperbacks except for the fact that it is made not of paper but of wood. Each wooden leaf, five by
thirteen inches and one-sixteenth inch thick, is bored with four holes on the left side, to be bound with a
cord in eight-leaved signatures. Since the accounts book was used over a span of four years, it had to be
“robust, portable, easy to use, and durable”. That anonymous reader’s requirements persist, with slight
circumstantial variations, and agree with mine, sixteen vertiginous centuries later.
A mammoth page from Audubon’s Birds of America. (photo credit 9.19)
The world’s tiniest book, the seventeenth-century Enclosed Flower-Garden. (photo credit 9.20)
The “Sahara Penguin” discovered at the Dakhleh Oasis. (photo credit 9.21)
The eighteen-year-old Colette reading in the garden at Chatillon Coligny. (photo credit 9.22)

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