La lecture des pierres

This book reveals the most beautiful stones in Roger Caillois’ exceptional collection through previously unpublished photographs, produced in collaboration with the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle de Paris (MNHN), which received a large part of the collection as a donation.

An essayist and academician, Roger Caillois became fascinated early on with “curious stones, which attract attention by some anomaly in their shape or by some significant oddity of design or colour”. He approached the mineral world with a very personal vision in which art and natural science created a new image of the universe.

This visual tour of Roger Caillois’ collection is accompanied by the reissue of his famous texts: Pierres,L’Écriture des pierresand Agates paradoxales. Descriptive and meditative, these texts are an eulogy of these minerals, which, when read, make us share the delight that they inspired in Roger Caillois.

An introduction by Massimiliano Gioni, associate director of the New Museum in New York and curator of the 2013 Venice Biennale, places Caillois’ works in the field of contemporary creation.