Imagine a bookshelf that you can hold in one hand, slightly bigger than your palm. Inside it are 40 of your favourite books in miniature form — a little personal library. 

My Little Library is just that: a diminutive bookcase filled with miniature books, the kind you can carry with you, place on your workspace, or fix it on a wall! Prabin C, a Kuttipuram-based software developer, combined his two loves — of reading and creating miniatures — when he struck upon the idea of creating miniature libraries lined with his favourite books. 

He says, “We may not all possess the books we have read or want to read. For example, if you borrowed them from the library. This way, although you cannot read them, the books will be with you always.” Prabin is the co-founder of a start-up in Kuttipuram which develops e-commerce websites and products for clients. 

“When I first made the product, I had no intention of monetising it. But then, when I started posting on Instagram, I started getting customisation enquiries,” he says. 

The bookshelf idea came to him a couple of years ago. “ It is not an easy idea to execute because it is hard to develop the product, which took time,” he says. First came the bookshelf and its door, for which he initially used wood and glass, but after breakage during shipping he switched to MDF sheet and an alternative to glass.

Prabin has a ‘collection’ of more than 600 titles, including Malayalam and English titles. The smallest shelf is 5x3 inches and can fit 50 books, while the largest is 12x8 inches and can fit more than 400 miniature books. It can be customised to fit Malayalam, English or books that are a combination of both languages. The covers are exact replicas of the original.  

He says, “Chances are that I would have the books, because I have most books which the average reader would be familiar with. Sometimes people choose the books they want on their ‘shelf’, and if I have them I ‘put’ them on the shelf. I don’t make books that I don’t have in my collection because making one miniature is a lot of work.” This library can be a wishlist of books you want to read. 

There have been occasions when he has bent this rule. “We get requests to make a shelf for an author as a gift for them. Obviously, their titles would need to be on it. Then we do make specific books by that author,” Prabin says. However, he adds, chances are we may already have the books in our collection. He makes the miniature books and shelves, and has help as well. 

In the past year-and-a-half of its existence, he has already sold more than 3,000 little libraries. He has been getting enquiries in other languages like Tamil, Telugu and Hindi on My Little Library’s Instagram page. “I have not delved into those because I am not familiar with the literature of those languages. That will have to wait, I might do something along the lines in the future,” he adds.

The libraries are priced from ₹1299 for the smallest to ₹4899 for the largest. 

Content creator Afeefa VP says of her ‘little library’, “This is my small world comprising [Vaikkom Muhmmad] Basheer, Madhavikutty [Kamala Das], and Benyamin. Certain things are special not because of their size but because of what they encompass!”

My Little Library is on Instagram @my_little_library_