Life’s Mini Pleasures
In early 2024, I came across a miniature replica of a bookshelf situated in a recycled Altoids tin on my Instagram “explore” page. It was impossible to pass this over. Clicking on it, I saw that this shelf contained everything that the poster had read over the last year. Emma Foss is the artist behind Y Street Studio. She uses her social media accounts to share her art, along with DIY and upcycling tips that she integrates into her posts. She showed how she used Canva, paper cutting, and foam board to give a physical and visual representation of her 2023 book log. This was Goodreads without giving your data to Amazon! I was surprised to see friends I didn’t even peg as bookworms had liked this. It had gone viral!
Now, I go into every new year with the lofty goal of keeping track of everything I’ve read/seen/watched in that year. I spend time staking out the perfect notebook, stickers, even pens to use. Of the many years I have tried this, 2020 remains the only complete log – spread across three Field Notes notebooks is the “story” of how I spent that strange year.
Maybe doing it in Foss’s crafty way would inspire me. It’s adaptable too; books, movies, even Playbills from shows I’ve seen could make up a shelf. I made sure to bookmark the post as something I could and should do. I didn’t, but I did become intrigued by the idea of miniature books.
This past September, I was walking through a Hudson-area Wal-Mart with some friends. Living in New York City, I always find it soothing when I get the chance to experience the comforts of suburbia. The truncated versions of stores like Target that open in big cities rarely have the treasures found in the real stores.
There’s always a section of items that you don’t really need. When I worked at Blockbuster Video, they were labeled as “impulse purchases” on the monthly store layout – items that you didn’t require, but you wanted. That’s the Wal-Mart section where, amongst other miniature items, I first saw the Mini Brands book series.
Mini Madness
Zuru’s Mini Brands capsules blew up across social media, particularly TikTok, in 2019. Weeks before that year’s Thanksgiving, my boyfriend’s mom asked the whole family if we could each pick up our own capsules to open after dinner; she had seen TikToks of people opening them up, and it looked like fun. It was.
Zuru has been in the toy business since 2003. While they have plenty of products — like Bunch O Balloons, Fugglers, and Baby Corns, as well as licensing deals with Disney and Nickelodeon — their premier product seems to be the Mini Brands. When purchasing something from the Mini Brands line, you receive a capsule containing five different items of different “rarities”. This is known as a blind box; you won’t know what’s in the capsules until you open them. Targeted at children ages 3 and up (as noted on the capsules themselves), they hit stores in 2019 to strong positive and negative reactions.
Amanda Hess described these small items as “brain-soothing.” [I] There’s something “reassuring” about seeing an item that you are completely familiar with, like Kikkoman Soy Sauce, and it being such a small size. It makes you feel like a giant! It makes you feel, well, like you’re thinking like a kid again. Zuru didn’t start the micro trend — miniature collectors and groups have been crafting and collecting long before Zuru entered the marketplace — but the brand resonated with a new crowd.
As the 2024 holidays approached, Felecia Wellington Radel reported for USA Today about Mini Brands’ continued presence [II]. Tracing the history of miniatures to pre-Zuru, she spoke with members from a New Jersey miniature collecting society. Founded in 1986, the group continues to see strong membership. One of their founding members told Radel that it was great to see new people in the hobby, whether from crafting or buying mini-items. With advancements in 3D printing, an increased presence of chain craft stores, and the convenience of sites like Canva, more people have the chance to explore their crafty side.
Mini Brands began with items you would have on your grocery list — brand name boxed and canned foods, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, that sort of thing. Since then, they’ve done shoes, home decor, and partnerships with the likes of the Disney Store. With Mini Brands being around for over five years now, it’s hard to believe that they only recently released a series revolving around books.
Grow Your Own Library
Upon opening a Zuru Mini Brands book capsule, you’ll see several small bags. You are guaranteed three books inside. Besides the books, each capsule comes with a magnifying glass, a bookmark, and your own personal bookshelf (if only that happened in real life!).
These white shelves are bare. They recall the supplementary bookshelves purchased from a big box store when space has run out on your current shelves. They are blank canvases. There’s only so much they can handle before they obscure the titles you own or, even worse, begin to warp. The more imaginative mind of the 3+ set might allow for markers to color in and dazzle them up… maybe even some stickers. The shelves will be showing wear and signs of character in no time.
Curatorial Choices
As a librarian and curator of my own personal collection, I found the selection of books and their placements rather curious. They run across several different publishers, genres, age ranges, and even formats. With the entire history of literature at their disposal, it made me wonder… why these titles?
In the “rare” section, the 1995 novelization of Clueless by H.B. Gilmour is available. It is an exact mini-replica of the book that you could purchase at bookstores, or your school’s Scholastic book fair in 1995. This is a coveted nostalgia pick.
…Which is why I personally feel like the design of the capsule Goosebumps books are a missed opportunity! Why is it that these popular 90s books feature their rereleased 2003 covers? Why not go for the classic look, especially given the Clueless inclusion? If the aged 3+ curators don’t have nostalgia for Clueless and instead find it to be a curio, wouldn’t Goosebumps be the same?
Or at the very least, couldn’t the “legendary” rare edition pay tribute to the original? Instead, it is just a glow in the dark 2003 cover edition of the first Goosebumps: Night of the Living Dummy book – a version of this title that does not even exist in full-size form! The fact that the rarest category of miniature book, legendary, is not a rare or historic book seems like a missed opportunity to introduce different audiences to this material.
There is something a little strange about the other rare label, “iconic,” being used for a somewhat obscure companion book to Netflix’s Stranger Things. If we’re talking about iconic and literary, it seems that Slappy the Dummy or even taking a dip into Pilkey’s Captain Underpants series fits that moniker more…
The closest to an actual “rare” book in the collection looked to be the Burn Book, featured in the 2004 film Mean Girls. In the context of the film, the Burn Book is a manuscript. The members of the popular girl clique, the Plastics, have written it over a number of years to badmouth and gossip about their classmates; only one copy exists.
I was disappointed to learn that the highly coveted (by me) Burn Book that comes from this collection is based off the blank journal that Insight Editions put out (I don’t think printing about someone “making out with a hot dog” or being “fugly,” is 3+ appropriate, even at a microscopic scale). Venturing through the Mini Brands TikTok fandom, you can see the empty lined notebook pages; in response, fans have taken to recreating The Plastics’ handywork themselves.
Tiny Taboo Tomes
With the removal of Mean Girls’ iconic accusations, that leaves the inclusion of Colleen Hoover’s oeuvre as the most controversial here, containing the darkest subject matter in the collection. Her most popular novels, It Ends With Us and its sequels, deal with the subject of spousal abuse. There has long been chatter about how sensitively (or not) it deals with the topic, reinvigorated when the movie released earlier in 2024. As the movie had been in development for some time, Zuru foresaw the potential issues with young kids handing out their miniscule copy of It Ends With Us while playing librarian or bookseller; the brand opted to include the sequel instead, It Begins With Us. The other Hoover option, Reminders of Him, is a story about “hope and healing” as a formerly incarcerated mother hopes to reconnect with her young daughter. Both are heavy reading.
Hoover’s books have been banned from several school libraries [III]. Roald Dahl, Dav Pilkey, and Jeff Kinney are other featured authors in the collection who are no stranger to having their books banned. There was even a time when Goosebumps was a popular banned book series in schools. At the height of their popularity, from 1990-1999, they were featured on the American Library Association’s most frequently banned books [VII]. Are these toys, particularly this series, as “brain-smoothing” as Hess made them out to be? In the face of unprecedented book banning activity and violence targeted at libraries across the US, the inclusion of titles like Pilkey’s Dog Man in this set carries (perhaps unintended) weight. What can a kid do when their favorite title is threatened [VIII]? Reading Dog Man or owning a tiny little version of that book on your little toy shelf becomes a subversive act.
Book Feels
Writing about the non-book Mini Brands series, Hess and Radel remarked on the familiarity that the mini supermarket items bring to them and those that they talked to. They recall the supermarket scene from Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise — that finale, in prose and film, is an ode to the comforting normalcy of engaging in consumerism. We can be at peace again. A trip to Target, including the paperback aisle, produced the same kind of relief after the isolation felt worldwide in 2020. I think that’s a fair assessment, but it ignores a more complex idea.
The books included in these capsules are those that kids might see as their stroller passes by the colorful Target book section, their alluring covers causing their guardians to pick them up in the first place. Adult consumerism has literally been encapsulated – if you’ll pardon the pun – in these miniature toys. Children are also emulating the places they visit. The child playing with the Mini Brands sees shelves of books every week when they go to story time, or a craft session at their local library branch. Their trip to the store isn’t complete without a stop down the book aisle. They see a parent or guardian picking up a book at the end of the day; the text or the covers don’t particularly matter.
Both the Mini Brands and Foss’ 2023 “read shelf” remind others of that fulfillment brought on by our favorite items, in handy pocket size. Whether we are thinking of the places we like to visit that feature books, or the titles that brought us “the feels” in the last year, we are getting more than that happy, “brain-smoothing” effect Hess wrote about.
As bookish people, we know the tranquility that these objects possess. I don’t think most of us needed a global catastrophe to reinforce that! We have always been aware that these book temples that we work in, curate, or live amongst, are our sacred spaces. We also know the power that books have. Beyond calming us, books inspire, books help us remember, and books help us to be better people.
Notes
I https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/arts/mini-brands-supermarket-sweep.html
II https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/11/22/mini-brands-grow-popularity/76280627007/
III https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2024/06/06/10-most-banned-authors-in-iowa-include-jodi-picoult-colleen-hoover-toni-morrison-sf496/73827741007/
IV. https://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-captain-underpants-banned-gay-character-20151027-story.html
V https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2009
VI https://www.parents.com/let-your-child-read-graphic-novels-6951595
VII https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade1999
VIII https://www.slj.com/story/is-there-a-looming-dog-man-crisis-censorship-libraries