Tiny Wonders : Thumbnail-Size Classics Have Huge Following Among Collectors

Barbara Raheb is the biggest little book publisher around.

Her gold-embossed volumes measure less than an inch high. Their pages are no bigger than a fingernail. Their words are so tiny that a line of type can be covered by a shirt thread. Lined up side by side, the 345 works she has produced during 17 years fill a shelf little more than three feet long.

Raheb is the world’s most prolific publisher of microminiature books--dollhouse-scaled volumes. Such books have been prized by collectors for hundreds of years.

Her book bindery is a spare bedroom in her Agoura Hills townhouse. It is cluttered with tiny stacks of printed pages, a hand-operated press that stamps out book covers, a pint-sized guillotine that trims pages and a five-pound hunk of marble that presses the finished books.

She specializes in the classics--works by Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Emily Dickinson. Some are abridged into truly condensed books.

Others contain every word. Her Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” runs 206 pages. Her four-volume “The Hound of the Baskervilles” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle covers 456 pages.

But it’s her most colorful books that jump out at you.

They are microscopic popup children’s editions whose pages are filled with characters that move, trees that seem to talk and castle doors that open. Book experts say she is the only publisher in the world who produces them.

Her tiny books are a hobby that just grew out of control.

‘I’ve done it out of stupidity and naivete,” she said. “I started it so I could have some classics for the bookshelf in a Victorian dollhouse I was building. It’s ridiculous.”

There’s nothing silly about her work to the hundreds of collectors around the world who pay up to $200 each for some of her books.

“After I bought my first one, I just couldn’t stop,” said Grace Broecker, a Closter, N.J., fan who owns 300 of Raheb’s editions and has placed advertisements in collectors’ magazines in hope of finding others.

“I’d bought her ‘Sonnets From the Portuguese’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I couldn’t believe it. It was all there. It was beautiful. It was perfection.”

Broecker said she uses a magnifying glass to read the books she hasn’t previously read in full-size editions. The rest she just enjoys looking at.

“You just want to go back again and again and marvel at them.”

It’s a marvel they ever got printed. Ron Howard Jr. of Advanced Litho in Northridge said he didn’t want Raheb’s business at first.

“We thought the job would be impossible to do,” he said. “We’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t figure out why anybody wanted anything that small.”

Raheb had walked in with layout boards containing eight pasted-up pages of regular type. She wanted the layouts shrunk an eye-popping 500% and printed on both sides of 2-inch by 3-inch pieces of paper.

Howard’s pressmen struggled to keep the minuscule O’s, Bs and Ms from filling in with ink. They wasted hundreds of sheets of paper trying to perfectly match the position of the printing on the two sides of each sheet.

“A piece of lint on the paper would obliterate a whole word,” Howard said. “It was the hardest single-color printing job I’d ever seen.”

Workers almost ran screaming out the back door when Raheb returned with her second book. “We’d thought it was going to be a one-shot deal,” he said.

Her books are routine now. After the pages are printed, Raheb takes them home and uses water-based German paint pencils to hand-color the tiny illustrations before binding.

The 16 pages on a sheet format allows for quick assembly. Four sheets are folded and stitched together with needle and thread to produce a 64-page book after the paper is trimmed. A leather-like, embossed cover is glued to the spine to complete the volume.

Her popup books are much more complicated and labor-intensive. Pages must be specially folded, cut and scored to ensure that they will pop out when opened. One of them, “The Haunted House,” contains seven intricately hand-painted, movable scenes.

“They are the smallest and most complex popups I’ve ever seen,” said James Lorson, an antiquarian bookseller from Fullerton. “People’s reaction when they see them is one of great pleasure and delight.”

Raheb’s books are the tiniest of the miniature world, said Glen Dawson, who at 80 is the dean of Los Angeles booksellers. His Dawson’s Book Shop was started in 1905 by his father.

“Printers occasionally come out with miniatures as a stunt or to show their proficiency. But Barbara has printed the most of anybody. And she does very good work,” said Dawson--who experimented with miniatures by publishing several in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Experts say small books were prized for their practicality in the days before movable type was invented. Hand-printed manuscripts about three inches high could easily be hidden or carried from place to place. When typesetting became possible and books could be printed on a mass scale, miniatures allowed readers to assemble their own libraries in a small space.

Msgr. Francis J. Weber, an author and historian who is director of the San Fernando Mission, has traced miniature books to the 13th Century. He recently donated his own 3,500-volume collection of miniatures to the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Five-hundred hard-core collectors belong to the Miniature Book Society, an international organization that he formerly headed, Weber said. But as he discovered when he tried his own hand at miniature book publishing, profits are also minuscule.

“You lose money on all of them,” Weber said. But because Raheb has carved out a small-book niche with her unusually large book catalogue, “Barbara probably makes a modest amount.”

Raheb, 59, who sews bindings at night while watching television, admits to a tiny book profit. Depending on the number of pages and hand-painted illustrations, her creations sell for $20 to $175. She publishes 300 copies of most editions.

She is already planning her most ambitious book--an illustrated version of “The Canterville Ghost” with unusual “fore-edge” illustrations on the outer edges of its pages.

“I like the challenge. It’s an obsession,” she said. “No one has ever done one on a book this small.”

It will be 15/16 of an inch high. But it’s certain to be a big seller.