La lecture des pierres

This book presents the most beautiful stones in the collection of minerals that Roger Caillois bequeathed to the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris, as well as the re-edition of the famous texts Stones, The Writing of Stones, and Paradoxical Agates.

A man of letters and a companion to the surrealist movement, at a very young age Roger Caillois became interested in the mineral world, whose forms evoked imaginary figures to him. From the 1950s onwards, he started to collect minerals from all over the world, “curious stones that attract attention owing to some anomaly in their shape or some meaningful oddity in design or colour”. All of them have “an unexpected resemblance, one that is improbable and yet natural, which provokes fascination”.

Agates, marcasite, quartz, jasper…They are like so many fragments of the universe, of a world in which dream and poetry draw analogies with the plant and animal worlds, but also with that of humans.