A transplanted Fairbanks friend wrote recently to marvel how there are so many tempting subjects to explore and how hard it is to stop once you enter one of those rabbit holes. It led to wondering how deep do rabbit holes actually go.
“Up to 45 meters,” according to Rabbitsfreeaustralia.org.au, an admittedly biased yet scientifically sound source, like “as a rule of thumb, each adult rabbit keeps two entrances looking well used, so if a warren has 10 active entrances there are about 5 adult rabbits living there.”
The RFA’s motto is “Bilbies Not Bunnies.” Bilbies are desert-dwelling marsupial omnivores indigenous to the Australia-New Guinea region that weigh around 2 pounds, “have the characteristic bandicoot shape: a plump, arch-backed body with a long, delicately tapering snout, very large upright ears, relatively long, thin legs, and a thin tail.” The site notes that European wild rabbits in Spain “are mainstays of local ecosystems, bringing widespread benefits — but in Australia, wild rabbits are more like ‘ecosystem saboteurs’, dismantling whole ecosystems bit by bit. In Australia, the bilby plays a role like that of rabbits in their homeland. They are called ‘ecosystem engineers’ because of the benefits they bring.”
Moreover, rabbits compete with bilbys for food, and what’s this? Male rabbits “leap high over other rabbits in their group and urinate on them to mark their territory.”
It’s clear where this is going, and no end’s in sight. A recent post by Grace Tierney in her Wordfoolery blog, went into the odd origin of the term “miniature,” and from my old friend, the Online Etymology Dictionary, said in Roman times red lead, “minium” in Latin, was used to make red ink, and “miniare” meant “to paint red.” Red ink was a prominent color used by scribes (i.e. librarians) in the Dark and Middle Ages to make elaborate, decorative capital letters, and miniare came to mean “to illuminate a manuscript” in Italian and soon evolved into “miniature,” meaning a “manuscript illumination or small picture.”
It wasn’t until 1714 that the miniature meant “on a small scale, much reduced from natural size,” in English, and little dogs weren’t called miniature until 1889, four years before the first miniature golf course opened.
Then there’s the world of miniature painting. Not having the most retentive memory, I surprisingly recalled a passage from Samuel Pepys’ Diaries where he hired a famous miniaturist to paint his wife’s portrait. The artist was Samuel Cooper, considered the greatest English miniaturist, just as Pepys is the greatest English language diarist ever. Every night for nine years I read what happened to Sam that day in the 1660s. Sure enough, on March 30, 1668 he took his wife, to a London “coffee-house” to meet “Mr. Cooper, the great painter.” They went “presently to Mr. Cooper’s house, to see some of his work, which is all in little, but so excellent as, though I must confess I do think the colouring of the flesh to be a little forced, yet the painting is so extraordinary, as I do never expect to see the like again. Here I did see Mrs. Stewart’s picture as when a young maid, and now just done before her having the smallpox: and it would make a man weep to see what she was then, and what she is like to be, by people’s discourse, now.”
Pepys paid 30 pounds for Cooper to make a miniature of his wife but wasn’t entirely satisfied. On Aug. 10 he wrote, “to Cooper’s, where I spent all the afternoon with my wife and girl, seeing him make an end of her picture, which he did to my great content, though not so great as, I confess, I expected, being not satisfied in the greatness of the resemblance, nor in the blue garment: but it is most certainly a most rare piece of work, as to the painting.” Regardless, Cooper’s work was extremely popular, and he also played a hot lute, by all accounts. As for Mrs. Stewart’s smallpox, she was Frances Stewart a noted beauty whose main claim to fame came from refusing to be King Charles II’s mistress. Her Wikipedia article states that because of “her great beauty she was known as La Belle Stuart and served as the model for an idealized, female Britannia. She is one of the Windsor Beauties.”
However, it added that “Her beauty appeared to her contemporaries to be equaled only by her childish silliness; but her letters to her husband, preserved in the British Library, are not devoid of good sense and feeling.” Nonetheless, the “The Count de Gramont said of her that ‘it would be difficult to imagine less brain combined with more beauty.” Pepys, who had a bright eye for the ladies, grieved that long-ago March day because she contracted smallpox in her twenties that terribly scarred her complexion. No immunization to try to debunk in those days! But this came after she’d been painted by the court artist Peter Lely at the king’s command for his private viewing, along with nine other abnormally good-looking women (some of whom didn’t refuse the King’s bed). They collectively became known as “The Windsor Beauties.”
The art world’s crawling with miniaturists these days. “19 Mighty Talented Miniature Artists Around the World,” a NiceNews.com article by Marika Price Spitulski, surveyed some, including the anonymous owner of the Miniature Space YouTube channel who uses tiny implements to cook edible miniatures using real food. Lorraine Loots’ “Painting for Ants” sites means just that, gorgeous teeny paintings on a scale ants would appreciate if they could see. Barcelona-based Raya Bujana “makes realistic houseplants and flower jewelry out of paper …. using a tweezer to meticulously weave flower baskets, refine leaves, and put the finishing touches on each pretty plant.” However, Englishman Willard Wigan, born in 1957 to Jamaican immigrants, stands apart. He makes “micro-miniature” sculptures that “are typically placed in the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin. A single sculpture can be as small as 0.005 mm (0.0002 in).” His work includes the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, the Last Supper, and Henry VIII and his brides, all inside the eyes of needles. His Wikipedia article adds that he has dyslexia and Asperger’s that went undiagnosed until he was an adult. His inability to read led to public ridicule by his primary teachers, and he “attributes his early drive to sculpting, which began at the age of 5, to his need to escape from the derision of teachers and classmates. He wanted to show the world that nothing did not exist, deducing that if people were unable to view his work, then they would not be in any position to criticize it.” The Miniature Book Society says that “a miniature book is usually considered to be one which is no more than three inches in height, width, or thickness.” Wikipedia elaborated, adding “Many collectors consider nineteenth century and earlier books of 4 inches to fit in the category of miniatures. Book from 3–4 inches in all dimensions are termed macrominiature books. Books less than 1 inch in all dimensions are called microminiature books. Books less than one-fourth inch in all dimensions are known as ultra-microminiature books.”
It’s hard to determine the “World’s Smallest Book,” however, since “the title can apply to a variety of accomplishments: smallest overall size, smallest book with movable type, smallest printed book, smallest book legible to the naked eye, and so on.”
Several notable miniature books are owned by the National Library of Scotland, a country that’s a hotbed of miniature bookmaking. The smallest letterpress book they own is Gleniffer Press of Scotland’s 1978 “Three Blind Mice.”
“The 15 pages of text were printed on pages of fine white paper which had been cut to size with a scalpel. Dental tweezers were used to glue the eight leaves, one at a time, to the case.” My eye was caught by their 40-volume “The Ellen Terry Shakespeare” printed in 1904 and dedicated the actress. Each volume of her tiny Shakespeare library is about 1.25 x 1.9 x 0.35 inches, with gilt edges. “The bindings are mostly red Morocco leather or vellum, some with beautifully precise gold-tooled decoration,” and “Each book contains a tiny bookplate designed by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.” Dame Ellen Terry, according to the British American Drama Academy, was “born in England in 1847 to a moderately successful family of traveling,” and her Shakesperean acting career began at age 9 in “The Winter’s Tale” for which she received “positive notices from critics despite reportedly tripping during the opening night performance.” After a brief marriage at 17, and after “entering a relationship with famed architect and designer Edward William Godwin, she became “one of the most important and sought-after actresses in London. In 1878, at age 30, Ellen began a professional partnership with the actor and producer Henry Irving that would cement her place as Britain’s most famous actress.” She became the lead actress at the Lyceum Theatre and starred with Irving for 20 years in productions of Shakespeare. Afterwards, Terry’s lectures on Shakespeare and acting were wildly popular in Britain and the US. And she made a whopping (for the time) £200 weekly salary.
Collecting miniatures makes sense from a storage perspective, but I’ll take a standard poodle over a miniature one, and that goes double for adopting a Netherland Dwarf rabbit. Did you know they may be extremely cute, intelligent (for rabbits, anyway), and playful, but their inbreeding’s led to all sorts of genetic respiratory and dental issues. But I’ll save all that for later.
