Yesterday we went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where I saw, for the first time, the permanent collection known as the Thorne Miniature Rooms. The link will tell you more about these displays, but essentially they are miniature replicas of period rooms representing various eras in (mostly) European and American history. Each is displayed as a glass-fronted box slid into the wall, allowing you to peer into into a dollhouse-sized, incredibly detailed room, with glimpses of linked rooms and gardens and street scenes beyond the room's windows. If you are a lover of the children's book The Borrowers, you will adore these rooms. I was entranced.

The photos on the website don't quite give the flavor of the effect of these rooms, partly because they simply look like photos of human-sized period replicas. In fact, most of the rooms are only about a foot square, but they have real parquet floors and actual little desks that lock and unlock and delicate curtains and perfectly turned staircases. Each space is filled with human presence, but there are no replicas of people, and that is part of the charm. They are spaces for imagining the story.