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‘Elegant and multi-focal. Glorious!’ Simon Garfield
‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes’ New Statesman
‘Lively, engaging and admirably wide-ranging’ The Times
‘Fascinating’ Observer
The humble pair of glasses might just be one of the world’s greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses?
Through the Looking Glasses traces the fascinating story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids for monkish scribes right through to today’s designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers, as well as the silent movie star Harold Lloyd, the rock’n’roller Buddy Holly and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe. This is a book about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us.
‘It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes’ New Statesman
‘Lively, engaging and admirably wide-ranging’ The Times
‘Fascinating’ Observer
The humble pair of glasses might just be one of the world’s greatest inventions, allowing millions to see a world that might otherwise appear a blur. And yet how much do many of us really think about these things perched on the ends of our noses?
Through the Looking Glasses traces the fascinating story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids for monkish scribes right through to today’s designer eyewear and the augmented reality of Google Glass. There are encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers and spectacle-makers, as well as the silent movie star Harold Lloyd, the rock’n’roller Buddy Holly and the full-screen figure of Marilyn Monroe. This is a book about vision and the need for humanity to see clearly, and where the impulse to improve our eyesight has led us.
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Reviews
It will make you look at specs with fresh eyes
This is a thorough, entertaining and thoroughly entertaining history of life through a lens
Fascinating... [An] exuberant history of spectacles and those who wear them
Witty, enjoyable and illuminating... the sort of book that makes you wonder why nobody has ever written it before... Elborough is an erudite cultural historian
Elborough is an elegant writer who moves easily between high art, tricky optics and celebrity culture... This is a lively, engaging, admirably wide-ranging history of everything you could possibly want to know about glasses
[An] exhaustive, illuminating celebration of eyewear... Elborough proves to be an endlessly entertaining and informative guide
[A] brilliantly enjoyable survey... Elborough brings his own experience as a lifelong myope beautifully to bear on his subject
A fascinating journey through the history of eye glasses... a rich and detailed account of technology, fashion, medicine and society... encyclopaedic historical and cultural range, intriguing insights and jocular prose
Fascinating
Elegantly framed and multi-focal, this is a gloriously panoptical survey... As a history of restored sight it is instructive, and as a narrative of facial furniture it is fascinating