Dan Waber's 'tiny booklets": The story not the storage.

Dan Waber has started a great little enterprise. These are biggy smalls. The large writ little. Handheld literary devices. His "tiny booklets" are just that. Tiny booklets. They each contain a 500-word story, or more than one. They sell for an American tooney. (Oh, yeah, they don't exist It'd be the same price as paying 40 wooden nickels.) They sell for $2 on Dan's online site.

So far, and knowing Dan, the series will expand rapidly, the series includes Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Paul Dutton, Martha Deed, Michael Aro, and Eileen R. Tabios. I've got two booklets in the series, each containing two short shorts. Something about chairs, convenience stores, anteaters, and a boy putting a pencil up another boy's nose.  I'd love to drop a whole bunch of these booklets from an airplane.

There are beautiful handcrafted books and then there are these short and sweet amuse bouches (amuse books?) which, while being simple yet beguiling little paper objects, are also the nano-epics for a miniature verbal world. The story is the thing, not the storage.


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Image: My fingers are the foreboding bare branches, the shadowy talons which which hover over my daughter's spare tooth-bitten post-dinner watermelon sculpture of a bobsledding family on the moon of a plate going nowhere on the table between us.