Full-size books, too, go mostly unread. Even Keats only looked into Chapman’s Homer. Derrida, a few years before his death, ran his eyes over the books in his library and said that he’d read only four of them. A fan of miniature books might take solace from the words of Callimachus, the third-century Greek who tersely noted, "Big book, big bore." One can make a case that all books should be smaller, that nearly all of them are bloated beyond the size of he small original contributions their writers have to offer, that we would all read more, not less, if, like elegant travelers on the 18th-century grand tour, we carried small portable libraries in our reticules, instead of marooning on our nightstands stacks of large books that we will always be too tired to read.”
Judith Pascoe,
“Tiny Tomes,” American Scholar, v. 75 no. 3, Summer 2006, p.133, 138.
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