Small ones

Hello everyone, and I hope you are all enjoying a nice weekend. I am back on the blog with some fine little books — the kind that fit easily in a coat pocket and that I tend to gather without quite meaning to.

The first is genuinely funny, and has a wonderfully funny title to match: Piepel, Popel und Piepel-Popel. It belongs to the 1970s German series called Kinder malen für Kinder — children draw for children. The illustrator on this one was nine years old when he made the drawings. The line is loose and confident, with the particular kind of seriousness that very small children bring to very small subjects. (Dietmar / Piter Miles, Verlag Ernst Chur, 1972.)

Far better known: the Pixi-Bücher. These tiny square paperbacks, ten by ten centimetres, twenty-four pages, were first published in 1954 and have been a fixture of German childhood ever since. Generations of small readers have grown up with them, often as the small reward at the end of a supermarket trip. Looking through old Pixi covers is its own kind of pleasure — you can almost watch German graphic design change decade by decade.

I also pulled out a couple of accordion-fold mini-books from the 1960s, an early Bruno Munari postcard book, and a tiny anthology of riddles printed in two colours. None of them is important, exactly. But laid out together on the table they make a quiet argument: that very small books are not lesser books. Often they are simply more concentrated, more design-conscious, more given over to a single idea.

If you collect, I would love to know which little ones live in your shelves. There is always room for one more.