Roger Caillois, LA LECTURE DES PIERRES, 2014

A man of letters and a companion of the surrealist movement, Roger Caillois was very early interested in the mineral world whose forms evoked for him figures of the imaginary. As early as the 1950s, he began collecting 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 possess “an unexpected, improbable and yet natural resemblance, which causes fascination”. Agates, pyrites, quartz, jasper… they are fragments of the universe, of a world where dream and poetry draw analogies with the vegetable and animal world but also with that of men. This book presents the 150 most beautiful stones from 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 Pierres, L ‘Ecriture des pierres and Agates pardoxales. For the first time, an exceptional collection created by one of the greatest poets of the 20th century will be unveiled.