I have a small bookshelf here at my desk and I keep smallish books on it. Many are paperback, but several are hardcovers in small trim sizes, and there's something about these small, hard rectangles that intrigues me.

Edmund White's The Flâneur can be spanned by one hand — it measures less than 5 inches across. Inside each line of text contains 6 to 8 words.

When I read a book like this, I turn pages quickly, but maybe not as quickly as you'd think. A page in a small book goes quickly, but there's a savoring that goes on, too. I know the book will be over soon, so I try not to rush. Maybe I try to give each page its due. In that way, small books do something to the mind as well as to the eye and hand.

My old copy of Jean Rostand's Toads and Toad Life from 1934 is a little bit bigger than White's book: about 5 x 7 inches. In it Rostand quotes from an entry in Larousse's dictionary about some French soldiers who were caught in a "shower" of newly metamorphosed baby toads:

M. Gayet, an officer, reported that he was leading a detachment of men in the Département du Nord, he was attacked by a storm which covered him and his soldiers with water and toadlets. A handkerchief was stretched out, and several of these amphibians collected, and after the storm the soldiers found still more in the angles of their three-cornered hats.

Tiny toads, tiny book.