Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones

Product Information

Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond. A collection of extravagant stories about artists, miners, princes, chancers, criminals – and above all collectors [...] a real cabinet of curiosities"

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones | NHBS Good Reads Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones | NHBS Good Reads

Have you ever gazed into a stone and wondered as to the stories it stores? The powers it possesses? In her fascinating book, Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones, Hettie Judah explores the hidden history of these lithic marvels, from their role in ancient cultures to their modern-day influences and uses. Hettie is curator of the Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood which will open at the Arnolfini in Bristol on 9 March 2024. Her book of the same title will be published globally by Thames & Hudson in summer 2024. Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this book is a beautifully designed collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history

Hettie Judah breaks her book down by types of stones into these categories;Stones and Powers, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stones and Living Stones. Under each of these divisions Judah discusses between 9-11 different stones.

Lapidarium) - Goodreads Books by Hettie Judah (Author of Lapidarium) - Goodreads

The moody millstone grit looming over those West Yorkshire moorlands, reshaped by centuries of savage winds and harsh rains, but as abrasive and tough as ever, provides reference to one of the county’s most famous authors, forged by the landscape into which she was born. In a forward to Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, just a year before her death, her sister Charlotte pictured Emily as a sculptor chiselling the novel ‘hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials… its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it’, and the poet Anne Carson relates to that same abrasive stone texture in terms of her father’s memory fractured through Alzheimer’s; Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium is a collection of essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history.A gem of a collection [...] a highly accessible guide delivered in a light, informative tone. Quietly authoritative, the author sustains our attention through the pithiness of her essays and the verve of her storytelling" Whitby and the surrounding area also come under the spotlight as Judah follows the fortunes of the Alum trade and its importance to the British textile and fashion industries. “Forged by the landscape” Whitby jet, imbued with the spirit of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele, inspires tales of male priests who cut off their own genitalia to identify as women, 1982 excavations at Cataractonium – a third-century Roman military base on the River Swale, climate change in the Lower Jurassic period, promiscuous women simulating states of virginity, and warding off snakes. Unfortunately, though, these important debates are being spoiled by a vocal minority of trolls who aren’t really interested in the issues, try to derail the conversations, register under fake names, and post vile abuse. An absolute feast for the senses, the book itself feels very much like a collector’s treasure hoarded wunderkammer of mythic and mysterious curiosities. It is split into six sections (Stones and Power, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stone, and Living Stones), and each section reveals a chapter devoted to unearthing an individual stone with imaginative, artful descriptions and a pretty wild, or wildly fascinating story connected to each stone.