I have a lot of books. Only part of our library is here in California, but it is still a lot of books by normal people’s standards, and a sufficient quantity to make moving something of an ordeal. My personal opinion is that real estate prices in the Bay area are as demented as the local politics, and I don’t have any real desire to buy the sort of house persons who are not Larry Ellison can afford, so we’ve been renting. Our first house had major electrical issues (the computers in the office reverted to UPS backup power whenever the pool vacuum came on), and the landlord would not invest in better power, so we moved.

I was walking through the old dump, doing some final clean up, and found casually discarded on the floor one miniature book. It was a 1991 facsimile reprint of Antoni Swach’s tiny Polish Armorial of 1705, only 3 3/4″ (95 mm.) by 2 1/4″ (55 mm.) in size. The Swach was small enough that the Mexican movers obviously did not think it could possible be a real book, or of any value at all, and just swept it to the floor when emptying its shelf. I was deeply annoyed, and was (at that particular moment) thirsting for Mexican blood on a scale reminiscent of Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

But miniature books, as the Wall Street Journal tells us today, come a lot smaller than my Antoni Swach, and are frequently lost.

The one on the left is less than one
millimeter square.