MANY SECRETS & MANY ANSWERS The Miniature Books of Pat Sweet BY TOM KNECHTEL
Rooting through used bookstores in Berlin in 2006, I discovered the minibuchs published in East Germany during the ’70s and ’80s. These tiny volumes, with their exquisite bindings and photos of happy children giving floral bouquets to returning cosmonauts, launched me into collecting miniature books. Over time I narrowed my focus to handmade books, books by artists and books that played with the idea of what a book could be. The world of miniature book publishing draws artists who recognize an opportunity to explore the book’s possibilities as an object and conveyer of what a book might mean. With fullsize books, the costs of production constrain creativity and unusual solutions. But presses like REM Miniatures and Juniper Von Phitzer, along with individual artists such as Alexis Smith, Nancy Jackson and Candice Lin, have exploited the freedom afforded by small scale and low production overhead to create wildly imaginative miniature books that capture and beguile us with the emotional magic felt when we first began handling and reading books. Recently this was explored in “TOMES,” a 2019 show devoted to artists’ books of all sizes, at the William-
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son Gallery at ArtCenter College in Pasadena. In the same year, the possibilities for extended creative explorations afforded by the miniature was seen in “Dreamhouse Vs. Punk House!,” the invitational group show staged by Kristen Calabrese and Josh Aster in three astonishing dollhouses filled with a compendium of artwork across all disciplines. Given the heightened interest in this form and my own collecting, it was only a matter of time before I discovered Pat Sweet and her publishing enterprise, Bo Press, operating out of Riverside, California. Born in Brattleboro, Vermont, and growing up in Keyser, West Virginia, Sweet studied at Potomac State College and West Virginia University before earning her MFA in stage design from Southern Methodist University. Joining the theater department at the University of California Riverside in the ’90s, she honed her skills at devising inventive solutions to individual problems (e.g. creating a coat that could be removed, turned inside out, upside down and backwards to become a suit of armor). The genesis of her oeuvre dawned in a dollhouse she built
