Reading the Stones

Xavier Barral EditionsReading StonesRoger CailloisPreface by Massimiliano GioniMan of letters and companion of the surrealist movement, Roger Caillois became interested very early in the mineral world, the forms of which evoked for him figures of the imagination. From the 1950s, he began to collect minerals from all over the world, "curious stones, which attract attention by some anomaly of their form or by some significant oddity of drawing or color". All have "an unexpected resemblance, improbable and yet natural, which provokes fascination. Agates, pyrites, quartz, jasper. they are all fragments of the universe, of a world where dream and poetry draw analogies with the plant and animal world but also with that of men. This work presents the 150 most beautiful stones of the collection of minerals that Roger Caillois bequeathed to the National Museum of natural history of Paris, as well as the re-edition of the famous texts Stones, The Writing of Stones and Pardoxal Agates. For the first time will be unveiled an exceptional collection created by one of the greatest poets of 20th century. Roger Caillois (1913-1978) While he was a student at the École Normale superior, Roger Caillois meets André Breton and becomes friends with the same period with Salvador Dalí, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, René Char. But he breaks with the surrealist group from 1935. Co-founder, with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, in 1938, from the College of Sociology, Caillois meets the wife of letters from Victoria Ocampo, who invites him to stay with her in Argentina for World War II. He then headed the French Institute in Buenos Aires Areas before launching the magazine Les Lettres françaises. Back in France, he runs the La Croix du Sud collection at Gallimard, specializing in South American literature introducing the work of Pablo Neruda or Miguel Angel Asturias, and translates the fantastic stories of Jorge Luis Borges. Poet, essayist, Roger Caillois published a prolific body of work, his books talk about war, dreams, poetry, myths, the imagination...