love of small things
Over four decades ago, Salakhova Zarifa Teymur was offered a deal that changed the trajectory of her life. “In November 1982, in Moscow, someone approached me to sell a facsimile small-format edition of the complete collection of I Krylov’s fables of 1835 with illustrations for 23 Rubles. At that time it was an expensive pleasure, but I still decided to go for it. I went to the warehouse to collect the book and was struck by a collection of miniature books. I was intrigued, and over the past 37 years, I have collected more than 9,000 miniature books published in 83 countries,” says the 92-year-old, whose collection today is housed in Baku’s charming old city called Icherisheher.
Opened in April 2002, the museum entered the Guinness Book of Records as the largest collection of miniature books in the world. How was it possible to accumulate it? “During my various trips abroad I frequented antique bookstores and book markets in London, Berlin, Munich, Brussels, Beijing, Paris, Havana and Moscow, etc. While some I gathered from friends, colleagues, collectors and publishers, in 1985, I began publishing miniature books myself,” she says.
Contributions to her collection also came from various sources: her late brother Tahir Salakhov and his friends gave her books from their personal collections; her son Tariel and his friends bring rare miniatures from their foreign trips; then there are books donated by statesmen, literary and art figures. For instance, in 2017, the Princess of Thailand donated 38 miniature books to the museum.
Each category labelled meticulously, are religious texts like a Quran from 1632 that is one inch by one inch, the Gospel, books on Buddhism, The Torah, Our Father, Ten Commandments, a mini Bhagavad Gita and a tiny Hanuman Chalisa. While most of the collection comes from Russia, some are quite familiar to English readers: The Call of the Wild, Alice in Wonderland, and The Lord of the Rings, etc. You can find the entire works of Shakespeare, in 40 volumes, published in 1841.
Miniature editions of Alexander Pushkin’s works are showcased prominently in a glass case, with one rare six mm by nine mm edition, published in Moscow in 1985, featuring works by Máxim Gorki and Pushkin. The rarest are four micro-books by Toppan Publishing House, Tokyo, Japan: the smallest (0.75x0.75) is the Japanese Flowers of the Four Seasons, which has 22 illustrated pages in its three-quarters of a millimetre square. The extraordinary craftsmanship involved commands deep admiration.