Full leather bound in vellum

Queen Mary's Dolls' House was a gift to Queen Mary from the nation; a showcase for contemporary craft and design, it preserved for history the ideal home of the 1920s, at a scale of one foot to one inch. Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria's granddaughter, conceived the idea, and through her influence many famous artists, designers, authors and craftsmen contributed to the project.

The dolls' house library contains, alongside standard works such as four tiny Bibles, miniature atlases and a complete works of Shakespeare, over 200 diminutive editions of contemporary British literature. Princess Marie Louise personally wrote to the most famous writers of the time to ask for either an original composition or a suitable passage from work already published, transcribed by hand or submitted for professional copying. Though most are manuscript, there are a few printed works.

The bindings are mostly morocco leather or vellum, some with beautifully precise gold-tooled decoration. The majority of the volumes were bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, with the remaining bound by Birdsall & Son, Hatchards, A. Loosely, R. Riviere & Sons and Zaehnsdorf. Each book contains a tiny bookplate designed by E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.

Measuring just 3.9 cm tall, this book was written by the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West for the dolls’ house. On pages no larger than a postage stamp, Vita handwrote the story of a sprite who moves into the dolls’ house and takes advantage of the luxuries the house has to offer.

Though married, Vita Sackville-West had several affairs with women, including the writer Virginia Woolf, with whom she maintained a ten-year relationship. Vita inspired the eponymous character in Woolf’s Orlando – a gender-fluid poet who lives for centuries encountering famous historical figures throughout their life. A Note of Explanation is a possible precursor to the book: its story of an ageless, fashionable sprite who has been present for all the major moments of fairytale history may have influenced Woolf’s work.