Ian Sansom

A world in a grain of sand

Simon Garfield’s enthusiasm for dolls’ houses, model villages, flea circuses and micro sculptures is irresistible

You will doubtless recall the model villages of your childhood holidays: the cold rain beating down upon you as you wander, confused, from the 1:15 scale Stonehenge to the 1:18 Houses of Parliament to the 1:32 scale model railway, before sneaking your foil-wrapped sandwiches into the tea shop to share a pot of tea. Or maybe that was just me and the Queen, who famously visited Bekonscot model village in Beaconsfield as a child back in the 1930s, clearly the perfect day out for any monarch-to-be, to be able to survey a ticky-tacky kingdom made entirely of resin, foamboard and nostalgia for a past that even then had never really existed.

Simon Garfield’s In Miniature is a book not just about model villages, but also about miniature books and portraits, flea circuses, miniature battleships, tiny furniture, and architectural models — anything that is a ‘reduced version of something that was originally bigger, or led to something bigger, and… consciously created as such’. Despite its subtitle, it’s not really a book about small things but about scale. Indeed, not everything he discusses is small: Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, for example, boasts ten miles of model railway on its 7,000 sqm site housed inside a warehouse, and features no fewer than 260,000 figurines, thousands of which are apparently ‘kidnapped’ every year by visitors seeking souvenirs.

‘The miniature world is more than an artless conglomeration of miniature things,’ claims Garfield; ‘it is instead a vibrant and deeply rooted ecosystem.’ This far-reaching, rhizome-like ecosystem he traces all the way from the history of the Hilliard miniatures to the Miniature Book Society’s Annual Convention at the Marriott Hotel in Oakland, California, where he is tempted to buy a copy of the Shiki no Kusabana, a book produced by the Toppan Printing Co.

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