tiny treasure.

Imagine a windswept moor in the north of England. Add a big house, where a clergyman and his four children live — isolated, pale little children inventing fantasy worlds in the nursery of a rambling old house.

These were the peculiar origins of the Bronte sisters, the novelists Emily, Charlotte and Anne who, with their brother Branwell, endured a grim and lonely upbringing by vanishing into fantasy worlds so obsessively and vividly imagined that they even had their own magazines. Next month, the auction house Sotheby's will sell one such manuscript produced by a 14-year-old Charlotte, estimated to fetch $315,000 to $475,000.

The magazine is tiny, "half the size of a credit card," Gabriel Heaton, deputy director of books and manuscripts at Sothebys, tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer, and designed to be the right size for the Bronte children's toy soldiers. Its 19 pages are crammed with more than 4,000 words — short stories, news, even advertisements — discernible only by magnifying glass. (via)