Over forty years Pierre Marly has collected almost three thousands items connected with the history of optics for his museum, the Musée des lunettes et lorgnettes de jadis (2, avenue Mozart in Paris): old books and treatises, rare prints, unusual and little-known documents as well as spectales, spyglasses and optical instruments making up what is probaly a unique collection. This living journey into the past which he has managed to reconstruct for us, however, should not blind to the fact that Pierre Marly was one of the first to realize that for all those men and women who take an interest in the quality of a cloth or the cut of a garment, glasses should not be "an ugly piece of iron or plastic perched on the nose" but rather an important statement of their personality. The hard-working apprentice who earned his optician's diploma in 1948 has become "the fashion designers of spectacles"; crowned heads, public figures and show business personalities all go to him for their custom made spectacles.
This book is based on Pierre Marly's collection. It retraces the history of spectacles from the time when it occured to somebody, at the end of XIIIth century, to nail together two lenses made of beryl. It looks at the shape of spectacles and how they were attached, at the cases they were kept in and the uses they were put to, from the sociocultural and sociopsycomogical viewpoint. Through miniatures, prints, paintings, carricatures and photographs, with the help of an historian and an ophtalmologist and optician, it show us how spectacles - these accessories which we all wear at some stage of our lives - are closely linked with the history of clothing and fashion, and more generally with the history of mentalities.

Pierre Marly "spectacles & spyglasses" - éditions Hoëbeke