VERY SMALL BOOKS FROM NEW TOLSTA

 

Having made a bookcase for the crofter’s doll’s house I now had to make some books. This is not a new thing for me as in the past I made similar books for my own doll’s house. With age has come a loss of feeling in my fingertips, but I still manage to thread needles and fiddle with the fabrication of very small items. It’s the sort of occupation I reserve for the winter months when I don’t want to venture far from a source of heat and the kitchen table becomes cluttered with creativity. Firstly I need to clear a small space amongst the detritus at one end of the table and start cutting up any old paper to the size I want for the pages. They are then folded and bound together with cotton just as a full size book would be. 

The outer coverings are a variety of reclaimed scraps from other books that have gone beyond the point of restoration, and are totally unsaleable. In this respect my father’s boxes of old Agricultural Society of Scotland annual publications have become a valuable resource with their blue Rexene bindings, while other books have provided good marbleized paper inner pages as well as leather spines. There is very little in this world that cannot be creatively reused. I will be offering an extremely small shelf of these books for sale this coming summer.