CAMBRIDGE — Exhibition titles don’t come more alliteratively straightforward than “Big Books, Tiny Tomes,” which runs at Harvard’s Houghton Library through Aug. 9. Houghton is the university’s rare-book library.
Harvard’s Peter Accardo and Molly Schwartzburg curated the show. In 10 display cases, a very large volume sits next to a very small one. Simply in terms of scale, the juxtapositions are visually delightful.
Approach more closely, and the pairings have tales to tell. The most amusing consists of two chapters, published in 1950 as individual volumes, from Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.” “Gulliver’s Voyage to Brobdingnag,” a land where everything is gigantic, is very big, nearly 183⁄4 inches long, just under 14 inches wide, and nearly a foot thick: big book.
“Gulliver’s Voyage to Lilliput,” a land where everything is small, is 33⁄4 inches long, 21⁄2 inches wide and half an inch thick: tiny tome. Advertisement A 1708 copy of Andreas Cellarius’s magnificent 17th-century star atlas, “Harmonia Macrocosmica” (even the title is pretty magnificent) shares its space with two items from “The Earth and Its Inhabitants,” published in Germany, c. 1840.
One is a globe slightly larger than a golf ball. The other is an accordion album, showing people from various places on the planet. The small scale is meant to make the items more appealing to children.
Printing a book large serves one of several purposes. Doing so can be sumptu.