“I Have Always Imagined That Paradise Will Be a Kind of Library” is the quote by Argentinian Author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), which welcomes visitors to “Petite Prose”, the website of Erez Benari, maker of unique miniature books. Starting in 2015, Benari has been making adorable miniatures of various books, as well as other printed media, such as playing cards, board games and even the Pantone color bridge set.
“I was always a fan of miniatures,” tells us Benari passionately. “For many years, I’d attend miniature shows and buy things, and in 2009, bought a full house miniature, complete with all the furniture and decorations, to which I added more over the years”. Around 2015, after seeing some miniature books at a miniature show, Benari decided to make his own books. “The miniature books they had for sale were cute, but they were nothing more than a piece of cardboard with a colored cover and some gold inlay,” said Benari. “This was quite generic stuff, and I felt I could do better.” Benari started developing a method, which was based on a special program he wrote, and a process of printing and manual binding he developed. “The application I wrote for this takes the raw text and generates a custom HTML file that contains the content in tiny font, which I then send to a high-resolution laser printer”. The printer that Benari uses is an enterprise-class Xerox device, which can print at higher resolution than most home printers and can also print on both sides of the page. Once printed, Benari uses a custom crop machine he built out of an arbor press to crop the pages to the size he needs, which is typically about 1.5×1 inch. After cropping, Benari glues the pages together, and then prints a miniature copy of the book’s original cover on photo-paper, and puts it all together, ending up with a fully readable (with a magnifier) copy of the book.
To get the source or raw material, Benari typically is able to find it online as PDF or EPUB books, and in some cases, he scans the original book page-by-page. “Naturally, I can’t fit the whole book into the miniature”, explains Benari. “I use the smallest font that is still readable, but it still only fits about 200 words per page. In addition, while a regular book can have 200-300 pages, a miniature book being about 1/6 of the size means it has to be about 1/6th the thickness to maintain a normal proportion.” That means that if Benari tried to cram an entire 300-page book, it would take about 750 pages, which would make the miniature book about 3 inches thick….and that wouldn’t look like a book at all.
We asked Benari what he does with these, and he said that they don’t have any particular purpose. “For me, it’s a fun hobby, and a good way to accumulate books I would otherwise have no room to store,” he says. “My library was already hundreds of books before this, filling an entire wall in my house, but this was a way to have more books without becoming a pack-rat”, he explains.
However, as Benari has many visitors to his house, interest grew in his books, which eventually convinced him to agree to sell some of them. “I’m doing well, financially, from my work in the tech sector,” says Benari, “so I don’t need the money, but many people wanted to have my books, so I relented and started taking orders”. The list of people who has Benari’s minis has become quite large over the years, including various celebrities like Whitney Cummings, Jim Gaffigan and Hillary Clinton. However, the most recognizable one would be former president Barack Obama. “In May 2015, I got a message from one of Obama’s aids in the white house, “says Benari. “He asked me to make a miniature copy of Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope”, which I gladly did”. Benari refused to charge the white house for his work but was ecstatic to receive a personal thank-you note from the president. “This was in mid-2015, towards the end of Obama’s 2nd term, and he sent me a signed photo, as well as a personal thank-you note, which is one of my most prized possessions to this day,” says Benari with excitement. “Some artists measure their success with numbers, or newspaper headlines, but for me, having someone like Obama enjoy my work is far more than I could ever dream,” exclaims Benari.
Can anyone buy your books, we wondered? “I have the website up, which shows off my work, but I don’t actively try to sell or promote them,” tells us Benari. “The amount of work involved in making a mini book is significant, so the amount of money I’d have to charge for them would make them a piece of art not many can afford, and quite frankly, I don’t really need the money anyway,” he says. “For me, this is about art, about creativity, and about expanding my own miniature library”.
What about copyrights, we asked Benari. “Copyright law allows me to make anything, as long as it’s for personal use, which most of my books are for,” explains Benari. “When someone else asks me to make them a book, I’m more limited, and so I can produce books that are out of copyright or otherwise in the public domain, or books that the clients themselves created”. Unsurprisingly, a particularly popular class of books are religious texts, mostly miniature copies of the Bible and the Quran. “Religious individuals are often very strongly tied to their faith,” explains Benari, “and carrying around a miniature copy of their faith’s books makes a lot of sense,” he says. One of the options Benari offers to his customers is to have the books in the form of jewelry, like a pendant, earrings, charms-bracelet or even a drinks-coaster. “I had a client who asked for a set of ‘Alice in wonderland’, where the original book was a pendant, and the books “through the looking glass” was a set of earrings,” shares Benari. “Since the book is all about mirrors, I made one earring normal, and the other one fully mirrored. It was super adorable”. Benari also made for himself a charms bracelet with all 7 Harry Potter books in super-miniature (15×10 mm) format, as well as a drink coaster containing the same books. “They were insanely adorable,” admits Benari,” but I ended up gifting them to one of my girlfriends, who was a huge fan of the series.”
After 6 years of making these, Benari’s mini library is quite jam-packed, and he doesn’t make them as often as before. “At the peak, I’d make a book or two every day, but now I only add one every month or so,” says Benari. “I just don’t have enough free time, so I usually make a new book only when someone asks me to make one,” he ads with a wry smile. “Occasionally, I come up with a new idea, like a miniature Pantone Color Guide I made for a friend who is a graphic designer. It has no use, of course, but she loves it and says it’s a wonderful conversation piece”. Perhaps one day Benari will figure out a way to miniature websites and make us a mini of ours!
