Bibliophilia - a passion for books

Five Centuries of Jewellery in the West, by Jean Lanellier and Anne-Marie Pini

Welcome back to a new post of the Treasure blog, where I share thoughts and images about some of the things I cherish more. Like books.

I am a bookworm (or, cuter Italian version, toped biblioteca) since I can read basically, as both my parents and grandparents were bibliophili - either by imitation or by genetics, I soon caught the bug too. In my parents apartment the library was a prominent piece of furniture, but if my dad’s collection was leaning more towards medicine, history and noir, my mum’s was an easier bit for a kid with hungry eyes: big, colorful catalogues of paintings, costumes, gardens, interiors… and jewelry. Her job as a costume designer for the opera required a deep documentation before production, and her bookshelves testified to her dedication. As soon as I could turn pages without ripping them, I was allowed to feast at her banquet of images too.

I first started sharing hints from her books on my Instagram stories during the 2020 lockdown, when while stuck at home for an undefined amount of time, we set on a mission to re-organize alphabetically the various libraries in their flat (an ambitious endeavor that took a good week to accomplish). Now that this blog is in place and find myself scanning my brain for treasured subjects to write about, my passion for books easily climbed the list. The harder part was to choose where to start, since my obsession spans large and wide - from comic novels to mystical symbology, from flower manuals to art brut catalogues. To keep it simple, I went for the most logical decision: starting with jewelry books.

Five Centuries of Jewelry in the West surely wasn’t the first jewelry book I dug my nose into (after mum’s tomes on Etruscan and Russian jewelry, the HEAD and RCA libraries were solid initiations), but I think the first one I owned. Found in a flea market by my boyfriend of the time, like most publications from the seventies not all pictures are in colors, and the contemporary jewelry section stops right after WWII; but the pieces included are unexpected and rich in stories, like the jewels from the Couronne de France, or Farah Pahlavi’s crown. So here is a taste for you of a scroll through the pages of this beautiful book.

Whether discovered while window shopping, borrowed from a friend or coveted for years before buying, probably books are my only collectible quirk, as all in all I am not very attracted to owning things (with a few remarkable exceptions, like shoes). I think what they represent to me is lively thirst for stories and a background of images I can go back to through the highs and lows of creativity. Being curious to learn about new subjects is my understanding of lust for life, and in an time when everything is filtered by an algorithm, books and other printed media are one of the few reliable escape routes towards unexpected encounters, discoveries out of context and sudden research twists.  Long live books, may they survive AI long after the last data center will have burnt out.