Miniature books

There are many ways of making miniature books, and it depends on what you want them for. You can make a proper book, with folded paper, cover, spine, endpapers, and you can have real text and pictures or just blank pages. Or you can make books to put in you book case with pretty spines. Or you can make mock fronts. Or mock books with nice covers. For my first book case I simply wanted loads of books, and since it is a nineteenth-century house they would all be leather-bound with golden print. So this is how I made them.

I cut bits of cardboard and glued them together until I had them as thick as I wanted. Then I cut pieces of leather: old wallets, gloves; the brown ones are made from a leather bookmark. I glued the cover around the cardboard, trimmed the edges and decorated the spines with a golden pencil. Obviously, these books cannot be opened. The book on top that can be opened is cut from a real book, but of course you cannot read it.

For Oxford English Dictionary I used a different technique. I cut the whole row of spines from a book catalogue and pasted on card with flaps on both sides, the depth of the bookcase. So there is actually nothing behind the front. Then I made one book with a cover, to create an effect.

 

There are magical signs on the spines of leather-bound books because the owner is a magician.