Through The Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles

The book "Through the Looking Glasses" explores the history of spectacles, from primitive visual aids to modern designer eyewear and augmented reality. It features encounters with ingenious medieval Italian glassmakers, myopic Renaissance rulers, and spectacle-makers, as well as silent movie star Harold Lloyd, rock n roller Buddy Holly, and Marilyn Monroe. It explores the impulse to improve eyesight and the need for humanity to see clearly.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 27 April 2023
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Elegant and multi-focal, glorious! Simon Garfield's "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, perched on the ends of our noses, 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? Through the Looking Glasses, traces the fascinating story of spectacles: from their inception as primitive visual aids for monkish scribes 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.

Weight: 280g
Dimension: 127 x 199 x 30 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780349144115