New Books

My very 1st dolls' house book was purchased years before I was interested in miniatures. It was Faith Eaton's Classic Dolls' Houses (1994 Edition) which I bought for S$10.00 at a Kinokuniya sale. I remember because I don't ever remove price tags from my books. I am a sort of bibliophile and my special interest is reference books on art & craft, architecture, culture and interior designs.

I remember not being very impressed with the book because it consisted mainly of black and white pictures. I did think however, that the subject matter was interesting because it featured historical dolls' houses. Today, I realised that these houses included some of the ones that I have fallen in love with, like the Mon Plaisir, The Thorne Rooms and Colleen Moore's Fairy Castle. I also realised that I bought the book at a steal because now, a new hard cover 1994 Edition is being sold at US$113.22 through Amazon.

Since then it has been quite an uphill task trying to find books on miniatures and dolls' houses here. Slightly over a year ago, I actually blogged about my frustration when I was just starting on the hobby. Researching has always been one of the 1st thing I do when I pick up anything new. So buying books on the subject has always been my modus operandi.

You can see from my shelf that my collection was very modest. I had more reference books on India than dolls' houses. Even then not all these books are on miniatures and the last stack with the Chinese characters were bought from Taiwan.

That is, until my visit to Kinokuniya yesterday. I had wanted to buy only 2 books, Orhan Pamuk's "My Name is Red" because I lost it at the airport when I was going to KL and Patrick Suskind's "Perfume". Well, I came home with 14 books, all related to my hobby, 4 on the cultural aspects and the rest on miniatures. I probably bought more books on minis and dolls' houses yesterday than the whole of last year minus the ones from Taiwan (I went crazy there too because I thought I better grabbed them when I could find them).

These are the books on dolls' houses:

Books On India :

And all that were bought after I have gone to the National Library to borrow these books:

I can no longer complain that there are not enough reference books here. It was a bumper crop of books yesterday and I didn't even go to Borders!

Perhaps interest in dolls' houses and miniatures have grown in our little country. Just this week, there was an article in one of our Chinese papers on miniaturists in Singapore. You can read about it of you wish because snowfern had translated the article into English in her blog!

Finally, I say. That is good news, very good news indeed!