Glasses cover art

Glasses

Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Glasses

By: Adam Geczy
Pre-order: Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Pre-order Now for £17.99

Pre-order Now for £17.99

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us.

Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous.

Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between ourselves and the world outside.
Aesthetics Literary History & Criticism Philosophy Physical Illness & Disease Social Sciences Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_c

Critic reviews

Glasses offers an insightful and engaging reflection on optics as aesthetics, asking what it means to look, and to be looked at, through and within lenses. With clarity and ease, it explores how glasses shape not only what we see but how we are seen. Sharp, focused, and full of vision.
A brisk pop meditation and manifesto, Adam Geczy's Glasses finds the poetry in prosthesis. As an unrepentant four-eyed nerd myself, I loved it.
No reviews yet