I think it was the towards the end of 2019 that the book nook craze hit the interwebs.
Spent more time then I’d like to admit scrolling through endless posts, tutorials and websites looking at the tiny worlds people were creating all over. The diversity of universes, methods and final results was fascinating.
So of course, I had to make one myself.
I’ve always been intrigued by tiny things. My favorite toys as a young one were Fisher Price Little People back when they were still made out of natural materials and The Sunshine Family. I didn’t have any of the accessories or structures for the doll family so I made my own out of cardboard, paper and anything else I could scrounge up around the house.
In the time between high school and college the place I was living wasn’t the best and I was working too many hours behind a hot stove on a line and just looking for a bit of an escape. Sometimes that was through drinking too much and slam dancing the night away in a mosh pit at a Ramone’s show. A gentler escape was browsing at the miniature store on the other side of town. I didn’t get there often and even when I did couldn’t do much more than ooh and ahh over the tiny treasures. I made the occasional small purchase to squirrel away for a day when I would have the time, money and space to build an actual miniature house and furnish it.
I think the box is in the basement next door.
College, kids and a couple of more careers took up the next few decades and my body decided it was long done with mosh pits as a viable means of escape.
So what’s next has been a persistent thought for the last couple of years.
And now there’s book nooks.
I like books. Lord knows I have an insane amount of shelving in just my study alone. 137 linear feet the last time I counted.
So I gathered ideas, photographs and materials. I’m not quite sure when I started working on the actual thing because the process photos that serve as an external memory in this day of dated digital photos were lost in the Great IPhone Bricking of November 2020. Based on my scattered memories (and whose memory isn’t a bit scattered after two years of plague?), I began actual construction sometime in early 2020.
Building the structure from foam core was a challenge since I’m not the best at cutting straight lines and I only had one sheet of foam core and no funds (and after March 2020 the ability) to purchase more. So I made it work. I always do.
The books took forever but were a great thing to keep my hands busy and my body upright as I was fighting off 6 sequential rounds of different weird pneumonias in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Every book was individually assembled complete with marbled end-papers and printed pages.
I’d finished up the structure, bookshelves, skylight, window (that took multiple tries and I still want to do another one) and the chair was halfway done when my mother got sick and eventually died. I’d even bought the tiny led lights so it would look like the sun was coming through the window and skylight. It all got set aside so that the Adult Responsibilities could be taken care of.
A year later it was time to clear out the unfinished projects that were taking up space on the worktable so I finished gluing the chair together, got over my fear of screwing up the lights and just finished the damn thing. It took less then a week and I wondered why I’d put it off for so long. This is a reoccurring theme around here but I’m working on it.
I’m great at starting projects, not so good at finishing them.
It’s not perfect but it’s done and in a place of honor on the bookshelf.
Now that I’ve been looking at it for the past few weeks, I think the draw of the tiny world is about the ability to build a home, a life, a tiny bit of the universe where I am queen and my word is law. I can literally shape the universe as I see fit. A powerful draw for a person who has all too often felt powerless.
I do so love being in charge of my own universe even if I have to build it from the ground up.
What world to build next?
