Indiana University Bloomington: Lilly Library Home to 16,000 Miniature Books
The Lilly Library at Indiana University brings a world of knowledge to your fingertips – literally.
The library owns thousands of miniature books, measuring three inches or less. Some are so small they sit comfortably on the end of a finger.
But the library’s collection itself isn’t tiny at all. In fact, it’s one of the largest in the world. Sixteen thousand miniature volumes fill the shelves – miniature shelves of course – of the library.
Some copies are so small that you need a pair of tweezers to flip through the pages.
The collection was donated in the early 1990s by Ruth E. Adomeit, an Ohio school teacher. Adomeit began what she described as the “incurable disease” of collecting in 1938 and continued for nearly six decades, according to a plaque under the collection’s showcase.
[Clip] Within the collection is a frame titled “The Smallest Books in the World.” Though that title is now outdated, it was named by Adomeit herself and maintained by the library. Inside the frame are microscopic books. For instance, “Poems” by Edgar Guest is one of the smallest handwritten books in the world. It looks like a speck compared to even the volumes measuring three inches tall.
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
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