Glasses
Adam Geczy · Object Lessons, Bloomsbury Academic · Coming Soon · 20 August 2026
Pre-order from Amazon · Pre-order from Bloomsbury
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Glasses are among the oldest and most commonplace prosthetics we have invented. But what does it mean to wear glasses? There is more to the answer than correcting vision. Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us.
Everyone has encounters with glasses, passively or actively, from reading glasses to sunglasses. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and sleazy. They are alternately the most mundane of things on our bodies and potentially the most glamorous.
Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between ourselves and the world outside.
Listen to the conversation:
Adam Geczy joins Miranda Melcher on the New Books Network to discuss what this ordinary object reveals about how we see, and how we are seen.
Reviews of Glasses
“Geczy weaves facts about and references to glasses in history, literature, cinema, fashion and popular culture. Whether your own specs are a sometimes-accessory or a lifeline, you’re sure to find something fascinating in this book.”
Hippocampus Magazine
“A brisk pop meditation and manifesto, Adam Geczy’s Glasses finds the poetry in prosthesis. As an unrepentant four-eyed nerd myself, I loved it.”
Jessica Glasscock
Author of Making a Spectacle: A Fashionable History of Eyewear
“Glasses offers an insightful and engaging reflection on optics as aesthetics, asking what it means to look, and to be looked at, through and within lenses. With clarity and ease, it explores how glasses shape not only what we see but how we are seen. Sharp, focused, and full of vision.”
Ania Malinowska
Author of Cutting Up Books: A Writing Method in Critical Thinking
