Two things happened this morning.
It started snowing and I finally excavated my way down to the layer in my cupboard where my boxes of “flat things” are stored.
I am currently looking for my embroidered carpets and my old pattern books and I was hopeful that they might be in one of these boxes. They weren’t, but I did find my meagre collection of Miniaturas Magazines.
This effectively stopped me looking at anything else for several hours.
The magazines are superbly produced and there is not one that I would willingly part with, but if I could only keep one it would have to be edition Number 53.
This features, for the main centre fold-out, the work of Manfred Kiedorf and Gerhard Bätz.
Their fantastic creations are currently on display in the Thuringian State Museum, Heidecksburg. The museum website does provide information in English and the – wholly inadequate! – on-line picture gallery for the exhibition is here.
The artist’s site Rococo en Miniature is entirely in German, but there are more / better photos of the models there, (I kept getting random photos when I clicked through the photo-gallery, but it was rather fun not knowing what to expect next – and apparantly you need an up-to-date browser or you can’t see the larger images when you click on a thumbnail).
There are also details of the correspondence between the two men and examples from their notebooks –
- notebook of Manfred Kiedorf
- notebook of Gerhard Bätz.
And there is a (VERY) short film here. (at the bottom of the page)
The above photos are from my copy of Miniaturas – edition 53.
Miniaturas is a Spanish publication. It used to be issued monthly, and I think it is still only available on subscription. This was certainly the only way I could get copies when I was buying them, and I only stopped due to lack of space!
Email miniat@arrakis.es for subscription details – the staff used to be fluent in English – BUT before you do, and it is a big BUT, the magazine is priced in Euros and around 10 years ago each issue was 5.11 Euros. I expect the price has increased since then and postage costs may well be high for countries outside the EU.
I had hoped to be able to write “Go To This Website To Get This Amazing Magazine” but when I googled “miniaturas construccion y coleccionismo” – which is the full title – I was rather disappointed to discover that their website was astonishingly sparse and devoid of information, pictures or publicity.
This made me wonder if they don’t need to advertise. They probably don’t, as they are very possibly (in my biased opinion) the best dolls’ house magazine EVER.
(I only inserted “possibly” in the previous sentence, because I know I have not seen every dolls’ house magazine in existence.)
I wouldn’t usually say this, because I prefer reading physical print publications, but roll on the day when there is an electronic version of Miniaturas available.
Hi Elizabeth,
My recent copy of Miniaturas shows that it is 6,00 Euros, but the rest of Europe it is 8!
I haven’t seen every dollhouse/miniature magazine either, but it is far superior to the ones I have seen!
Kathleen
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Hi Kathleen,
Thank you for letting me know about the price.
I had imagined that it had doubled at least.
I wish it was easier to get single copies – then I could treat myself to one now and again, while pretending that “just one more copy” would not take up too much space!
Elizabeth
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