My parents had a yard sale a couple of weeks ago and I came upon some tiny, coin-sized books that my grandmother made me when I was little for Barbie's bookshelf. I was struck by the detail of these books. Some had photocopied images of my aunts and brothers that Nana had shrunk to fit on the pages. Others were cookbooks, or encyclopedic books about nature with tiny pictures of mushrooms, etc. I really love the size. They are perfect humble objects- inventive use of materials, and definite objects existing in the world, providing information but occupying such a small space as to be portable and personal, and almost not existing at all.
The image is of books I have made in response. I am now using the size and scale of Nana's books to convey my own information--Quaker songs, poems I've written, journal entries, manifesto fragments. What I like best is, when people read the books, they sort of have to shed embarrassment and shame, and look at them like they would a Donald Judd or Ilya Kabakov work-investigative, naive, like a child.
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