DAY 5/7 FOR MINIATURE BOOK SOCIETY

I’m a new member of the Miniature Book Society and I was nominated to post 7 books for MBS’ Facebook page. "Miniature" books are sized at 3-4 inches or less. I’ll be replicating the posts on this blog for the next 7 days.

DAY 5/7  My favorite miniature book covers

MBS

I’m sharing books—some handmade—by some of today’s contemporary poets. These are one-off editions and likely would not be shown elsewhere. My fifth book is ZIMZALLA OBJECT 005 by Canadian poet Derek Beaulieu, sized at 1 x 1 inches. The 2011 book comes in a cotton bag containing a magnifying glass and was produced through zimZalla, a publishing project managed by stellar U.K. poet/writer Tom Jenks. Beaulieu is well-known and respected in contemporary radical visual and concrete poetry; reviewer Suzannah Evans writes about this particular book:

“… Beaulieu constructs images which use letters, rather than whole words (as with some concrete poems). The letters are combined with line drawings and this results in tiny intricate graphics, many of which are reminiscent of visual images that already exist in our day-to-day lives; staircases, map contours, chains of molecules, pieces of machinery. There is a great breadth of style in the graphics. In some the letters are easily recognizable, some are abstract and too tiny to read. The visual styles range from dot-matrix to calligraphy.”

I show two interior shots to exemplify what Evans describes; you can see her full review here at Sabotage Reviews.

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Today I nominate any new member of MBS. I love seeing all the books already shared, AND I’m also interested in the *gateway* books—those that made you discover mini books or the first books you’re collecting. Some of the books I’m posting, for example, were created before I knew that miniature books were a thing. So I nominate MBS New Member #5.

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This is a challenge for contributing to the spread of reading culture. The method of participation is to post a favorite book, one book per day, for 7 days. You upload some images with a short explanation about the book and invite one FB friend to participate in this challenge.