Well, you folks really seemed to like the post I made about Poe, so I thought I’d also share my other miniature books by Poe. These are visually less interesting, but they’re both great editions.
The 2003 Del Prado edition of The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories has 15 full short stories by Poe. It’s 2 ½ inches tall, 1 inch wide, and 640 pages long.
“The Gold Bug”, on the other hand, is a single short story put out by the Little Leather Library ca. 1930, 4 inches tall. The Little Leather Library put out over 100 short stories, poetry collections, and plays, but I have yet to find a complete list of everything they published. I do know they also have Poe’s “The Raven and Other Poems” and “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, though. This particular short story is actually not that spooky- it’s a treasure hunting story that introduces some basic elements of ciphers. Cool!
And for Halloween itself, let’s take a moment to appreciate the ever macabre Edgar Allan Poe!
The Selected Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, 2 ½ inches tall, published by Del Prado in 2003. E. T. A. Hoffman was an early German gothic fiction writer. Some of his stories would inspire the opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” by Jacques Offenbach. Two of those stories are included in this edition, “The Sand-Man” and “The Cremona Violin”, along with “The Deserted House” and “The History of Krakatuk”. Hoffmann is also know for writing “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King”, on which Tchaikovsky’s ballet is based.
I just love the way my little wooden fellow’s poses came out here.
It was a dark and windy September night. Then suddenly, before anyone could see it coming, the minute hand ticked from 11:59 to 00:00, and October flickered into being, grinning madly.
Merry October, everyone! This is the month of Spooky Miniature Books, starting with Del Prado’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Published in 2003 at 2 ½ inches tall, this edition presents Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella about a doctor with a Terrible Secret and a strange man that happens to be terrorizing the streets at night. Oddly enough, no one has ever seen them in the same room together- a coincidence, I’m sure.
