Small wonders

So, if my little corner of the blogosphere is going to be deserving of the "meticulous branding" (as my friend RAB called it) I have invested in it, I think I'll have to post more often than once a month...

Innyway, without further ado, here are a few (literally) small things to share. First up: wee books.

On a recent trip up to Vancouver BC, we stopped in a book store that routinely carries Coco's book-card set, so she could visit it on the shelf and feel all authory. It's a fairly woo-woo store, but as I browsed among the tarot, meditation, inspirational, and shamanism tomes, I found the two little volumes pictured above.

Now, let's put aside for the moment how one would create a book that allowed the reader to experience all of the novels of Dickens or all of the Shakespeare plays in one sitting, and ask the question why one would try to make such a thing. Is this a cram for a literary trivia contest? Is this an easy way to tick something off a bucket list? It confounds.

Here's a sample of how they did it - the narrative summary of Great Expectations :

Two whole pages for the intro - and the summary trots through the rest of the novel in just seven more minuscule leaves. I thought my mother's Reader's Digest Condensed Books were something, but this leaves them in the dust. To be fair, the books also use one page to print the first line of each novel and one to three pages to list the major characters, as well as providing each a single illustration (Pip and Miss Havisham), so there is that bonus material.

The Shakespeare volume is pretty similar: illustration, selected quote, characters, summary.

I'm still not really sure of what use these are - they would make the Cliff Notes version seem like an exegesis in comparison, so they are the very roughest of study guides. But they are both attractive and well-made, so there's that. Hey, I bought them.

I also bought this:

This was in the novelty notebooks section of my local bookstore along with things like Mars Passports and other such drollery. Unlike the others, though, this wasn't just a blank notebook with an amusing cover: it has "comic book pages" inside, compete with pre-lined panel borders.

There are four different layouts sequenced through the 64 pages, ready to fill in with colorful superheroics or black-and-white indie autobiography or a NYT bestselling graphic novel or whatever. You'd have to be a pretty fine artist - maybe using ligne claire work exclusively - since as you can tell from the scale, the individual panels are pretty small. The largest panel in this layout is less than 3x3". Given my limited drawing ability, I'm not sure what I will fill this with, but fill it I shall.

The publishers were kind enough to provide some technical assistance in this analog format:

The right hand side of this fold-out is a removable word balloon and caption box template, sized for the book, and the left side explains some lettering conventions. (One note: I have been studying comics for a long time, I think the use of underlining in word balloon is so rare as not to merit mention in guide, certainly not one as small as this.) The template will come in handy for whatever winds up filling the panels.

There it is: a short post for some small treasures. Let's hope the next interval between posts is short as well.