The earliest scientists ground and processed minerals in a centuries-long quest for a mythic stone that would prolong human life. Michelangelo climbed mountains in Tuscany searching for the sugar-white marble that would yield his sculptures. Catherine the Great wore the wealth of Russia stitched in gemstones onto the front of her bodices. Judah has taken 60 stones, some as precious as rubies and sapphires, some as unglamorous as granite and millstone grit, sub-dividing them into six sections – stones as symbols of power, stones used in sacred ceremonies, stones that find themselves a place in great literary works, stones associated with industry and technology, stones that have been shaped, sculptured and formed either by artists or the natural world, and stones as living entity, investigating such topics as mountain and cliff erosion, volcanic activity creating new islands and changing the landscape, loss of biodiversity as coastal reefs are replaced by concrete barriers, and the disturbing understanding that our plastic debris, discarded mobile phone components, batteries and other durable ephemera are already undergoing striking transformations in the anthropocene to become the fossils of the future.

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

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;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. 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

Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones — Hettie Judah Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones — Hettie Judah

A storybook, and a delightful one [...] The essays are shaped with great skill and Judah finds curious and pleasing symmetry and coincidences in the varied stories she tells [...] a portrait of our whole world created from the contents of the ground" Stone by stone, story by fascinating story, Lapidarium builds into a dazzling, epoch-spanning adventure through human culture, and beyond. 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. 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. Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, this audiobook is a beautiful collection of true stories about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history

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Geology is a story-telling science, requiring great leaps of poetic imagination,’ writes Hettie Judah in Lapidarium: The Secret Lives of Stones. Stones that come to us hard and cold and unchanging are the product of immense geological heat and upheaval. They provide glimpses into the inhuman abyss of time and are windows onto past epochs. And stones and minerals underpin every part of every civilisation, explaining and revealing, showing that the pinnacles of wealth, luxury and artistic achievement are often allied to misery, despoliation and violence. This review was originally published on NetGalley.com. I was given an ebook freely by NetGalley and the book’s publisher in return for a voluntary and honest review. 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.

Review: Lapidarium: The secret lives of stones by Hettie Judah

Inspired by the lapidaries of the ancient world, Lapidarium is a collection of essays about sixty different stones that have influenced our shared history. Here's the thing: I wanted to be able to come away from each chapter able to say a couple of sentences about each stone, but this book will leave you with a half–remembered sentence on someone who owned the stone in a century you probably won't remember. It's just a wholly unbalanced book. I wanted to love it – I think there should be loads of books encouraging us to reconnect with the natural world, to come away with some general knowledge about our planet and our surroundings and how it's shaped human civilisation at large. These tales do none of this. They're much too niche, poorly pulled together and not particularly interesting. As much as I liked the Rani of Kapurthala's crescent-shaped emerald, I really can't say I know anything about emeralds in general after reading this book. And that was one of my favourite chapters. The Stone of Scone, our Stone of Destiny (soon to re-appear in the headlines given its supposed journey to London for King Charles’s coronation) turns out to be another piece of Old Red Sandstone after scientists had it analysed as recently as 1998. Judah is an amazing writer. She weaves stone through human history showing us how we gave different types of stone the power of royalty and worship. She breaks down the history of each individual stone and how it’s impacted the human race through history. We interweave them in our mythology. They become a medium for our artwork generation after generation. Our advancement as a species came about by forging stone tools even now the Industrial Revolution was possible because of coal. A collection of extravagant stories about artists, miners, princes, chancers, criminals – and above all collectors [...] a real cabinet of curiosities"

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This book is more people-centric than stone centric. Each essay isn't actually about a stone, it's a niche tale about people with a connection to the stone in question, and it's the people that the essay focuses on. This in itself isn't a failing, but combined with the overuse of minor historical details and dates and bulky context (which, surely could have been reduced down) it is quite difficult to sift through and actually find any vaguely interesting information. Amongst these essays exploring how human culture has formed stone and, conversely, the roles stone has played in forming human culture, one will read of the Meat-Shaped Stone of Taiwan, a piece of banded jasper that resembles a tender piece of mouth-watering braised pork belly, There is the soap opera melodrama of Pele’s Hair, golden strands of volcanic glass, spun into hair-fine threads by volcanic gasses and blown across the landscape. And not to mention the hysterical metaphysical WTFery of angel-appointed wife swaps in the chapter of alchemist and astrologer John Dee’s smoky quartz cairngorm, as well as, the mystical modern-day TikTik moldavite craze vibing amongst those of the witchy-psychic persuasion. I cannot even tell you how many times I paused in my reading to open a new Google tab and research, thinking, “holy fake crystal skulls/malachite caskets/pyroclastic flow rap lyrics! I gotta learn more about this!” 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. 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”