An eye-opening read

If you’re looking for a suggestion how to dive into David King Dunaway’s appealing new book “A Four-Eyed World: How Glasses Changed the Way We See,” go to the author’s website davidkdunaway.com.

On the website’s home page you’ll find a series of short film clips that relate to the subject of glasses.

The first clip is from the 1959 crime/comedy “Some Like It Hot.” The clip has vocalist Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe) telling Josephine (Tony Curtis in disguise in drag) about why she’s going to Florida.

“Milllionaires. Lots of them. They all go south for the winter like birds,” Sugar coos.

“Oh, you gonna catch yourself a rich bird?” Josephine asks.

“Oh, I don’t care how rich he is as long as he has a yacht, his own private railroad car and his own toothpaste,” Sugar replies. 

"You're entitled."

“Maybe you’ll meet one, too, Josephine.”

“Uh-huh, with money like Rockefeller and shoulders like Johnny Weismuller,” Josephine chimes in.

“Oh, no,” Sugar advises. “I want mine to wear glasses. … Men who wear glasses are more gentle and sweet and helpless. Haven’t you ever noticed it? … They get those weak eyes from reading. Those long, tiny little columns in the Wall Street Journal.”

This scene is referenced in the chapter “Glasses Go Hollywood” in Dunaway’s new book.

The chapter says it’s the second movie in which Monroe is a gold-digger.

The first was in the 1953 movie “How to Marry a Millionaire.” In it, Monroe portrays a sexy, bespectacled librarian.

The same chapter takes the reader back to 1920s cinema, noting that the first movie character who often appeared in glasses was the silent film actor Harold Lloyd. He popularized the wearing of horn-rimmed glasses.

Another chapter, “Glasses Turn Literary,” has a longer timeline. There are quotes from William Shakespeare and it references Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” characters in several Charles Dickens’ novels who wear glasses as props, the glasses-wearing lead character in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies,” a host of children’s books that try to convince readers that glasses aren’t their worst nightmare and a 2016 Peanuts story in which Linus gets glasses.

A central element of Dunaway’s book is the eye-opening cultural history of eyeglasses. That takes him to Roger Bacon, a leading thinker in the effort to understand vision, light and how to offer clear sight to those who were not born with it.

Bacon, he writes in the book’s introduction, was a controversial 13th century Oxford scholar. His ambition and his scientific experiments caused him to run afoul of church authorities. Dunaway writes that sometimes Bacon is called the world’s first scientist and that “he almost invented glasses.”

The book’s first chapter, “The Beginning of Assisted Vision,” says that rock crystal magnifying lenses were found on the island of Crete dating from 1200 B.C.E. Starting in the 7th century B.C.E. during the Han Dynasty, the Chinese wore rock crystals as sunglasses and eye protection with frames made of tortoise shell. These glasses, Dunaway writes, were spiritual protection, not visual correction.

The fascinating figure of Bacon reappears in this chapter. He joined the Roman Catholic Church’s Order of Franciscans as a friar but bad-mouthed superiors so much he was assigned menial tasks. At night, he explored the theory and practice of optics and studied Arabic to read Arabic and Persian optics scholars. He learned to grind lenses.

Further disciplined, he was denied access to books.

Still, a new pope secretly encouraged Bacon’s studies, the friar wrote a lengthy proposal on parchment to the pope about a treatise on optics.

Alas, the book states, the pope died suddenly and probably didn’t read the proposal. It was sent sub rosa because the Franciscan order disallowed its friars from directly contacting the pope.

Bacon also sent the pope a matched pair of magnifiers, the closest thing to glasses yet developed, Dunaway writes.

Who invented eyeglasses? It’s unclear, but it was probably a late 13th century Italian from the town of Pisa, and the Italian was a likely a craftsman rather than a cleric.

Fast-forward to Colonial America for a touch of glassy humor. George Washington is quoted as telling a roomful of Continental Army officers, “Gentlemen, permit me to put on my spectacles, for, I have grown not only gray, but almost blind in the service of my country.”

Dunaway delightfully rolls in storytelling and personal ocular history in the preface and at the start of most sections.

In the preface, the author writes that between the ages of 10 and 13 he lost half of his vision, going from 20:400 to 20:600. “I couldn’t make out the big ‘E’ on the eye chart. Today, as I write this, my eyes are slowly failing. I’m grateful glasses let me see as well as I can, but I wish for more,” he said.

Given his condition, the general public should thank Dunaway for organizing and completing this important, comprehensive work.

Curiously, Dunaway announced early in the book he was doing his own experiment: To try not to wear his glasses for one week. He explained that “now that his vision was failing it felt like the right time to refocus (so to speak), to step away from that routine of slipping on glasses without a thought. Would there be any value in uncorrected sight?”

Two-thirds of the U.S. population wear glasses, Dunaway writes. He said he coined the term “glassers” since the dictionary doesn’t have a word for eyeglass wearers.

His book also addresses contacts and explores the future of eyewear.

Dunaway has written extensively about American culture. He is the author and editor of 10 volumes of history, including prize-winning biographies of Pete Seeger and Aldous Huxley. He is professor emeritus of creative writing at the University of New Mexico, a visiting professor of broadcasting at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and a DJ at KUNM-FM.

His oral history documentaries have been aired on NPR and he’s worked as a consultant to UNESCO, the National Park Service and the Library of Congress.