The rare, tiny, jewelled books that sell for up to $500 each (2024)

Andrea Boltresz knows a lot about books: how to procure them, sell them and, more recently, she has been making them, accidentally setting two precedents and catching the attention of collectors worldwide.

Ms Boltresz, who operates the bookstore Armchair Adventures at Robertson in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, has created 25 miniature books with jewelled, embroidered covers.

"There's not been an embroidered book in the miniature book world for many decades and there hasn't been a jewelled one, as far as we can tell, for many centuries," Ms Boltresz said.

"It's very exciting, we've just been invited to enter the Distinguished Book of the Year Award for the Miniature Book Society, which is the world's premier international collecting group for miniature books.

"It was a big surprise."

Selling for up to $500 each

The cost of Ms Boltresz's books varies according to the value of the jewels used on the cover.

"The gems are 2 millimetres maximum and the thread is one filament of silk, which is a very strong thread and I stitch every gem down twice," she said.

It's slow, exacting work.

"The bottom tier on one book cover was pearls, the next tier had semi-precious stones but three times the number of them, then even more stones and way more of them," Ms Boltresz said.

"So yes, they varied in price, and we topped out at $500 an item."

The books sold out in the first week.

Four of her 25 books have a gold insert including three birds and a bee, which were cast by a local jeweller.

"Trying to find something the right size that would fit in the book nicely … was tricky, but I wanted to add something opulent and extra that no-one had ever seen before on a miniature book," Ms Boltresz said.

"Depending on what's on them and how old they are, they can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, so they are really hard to collect."

History of jewelled books

Cassie Brand, curator of rare books at Washington University Libraries, said jewelled books had a long history.

"Books with gemstones were found as early as late antiquity and became less common during the Middle Ages," Ms Brand said.

"They were revived in the early 20th century by the binding firm Sangorski and Sutcliffe in opposition to the growing trend of edition binding in cloth."

One of the jewelled books in the Washington University Libraries' Rare Book Collections is a 19th century copy of The Princess, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, made by Sangorski and Sutcliffe. It is not a miniature.

"I'm not aware of too many jewelled miniatures that were created in the 20th century," Ms Brand said.

"But we recently purchased a miniature book from Stephen and Marian Byrne that is engraved silver with rubies and turquoise."

What are miniature books?

Miniature books are defined as being 7.5 centimetres tall or smaller.

While there is little written about jewelled bindings in miniature books, Ms Brand says they follow the style of average-sized books.

"Any history of binding on average size can be applied in miniature, at least in terms of style and decoration," she said.

Some buyers use the miniature books in a practical sense; however, the more delicate pieces like Ms Boltresz's are more likely to become decorative or a collector's item.

Taking inspiration from trees

To create her jewelled mini-book series, Ms Boltresz worked with book collector and publisher Todd Sommerfeld from Booksby Press, who she met through an American book collecting group.

It was her idea to embroider the book jackets but Mr Sommerfeld who proposed the subject matter, Trees, a poem by the American writer Joyce Kilmer.

Ms Boltresz said she loved it straight away.

"I am surrounded by trees; I was getting into using trees for dyeing and it all knitted together perfectly, that the subject of the book could actually represent my process and how I was going to bring trees into every aspect of it," she said.

The longer the project went on the more specific Ms Boltresz became about the dyes for the fabric covers, and where she'd collect them from.

"It became about the plants that grow around me, all the trees built into the books are from Wildes Meadow where I live, and now they represent this beautiful part of the world," she said.

The techniques Ms Boltresz used to create her collection come after years of experimentation and application.

Her skills were quickly identified.

"When we put Trees up for sale three were immediately bought by public collections," Ms Boltresz said.

"[The collections are] Ontario in Canada, Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and the Grolier Society, who specialise in publishing classic and rare literature."