THE INTERZINE

Neale Albert collects figures (not dolls). Most are miniatures. Right now, he and his wife, Margaret, own approximately 120 of them, all hand-crafted, specially commissioned pieces built to precisely 1/16th real-world scale. To house most of them, the couple even purchased the (life-sized) apartment directly above their own.This diminutive-minded disease (as Albert himself puts it) began in the mid-1980s, when he and his wife, Margaret, began commissioning to-scale replicas of their favorite rooms: the Falkland Arms pub in Great Tew, England; the library in Cliveden House, a manor outside London; the Bacchus Room from the Palladian Villa Barbero in Maser, Italy; and Marie Antoinette’s Fountainbleu boudoir. They also furnished each one down to the smallest detail-in the library, for example, the shelves are lined with individual one-sixteenth-scale books. (Albert is also a member of the Miniature Book Society.) Nothing was left out-except, of course, inhabitants. And so it began.