How to Use Your Eyes

James Elkins's How to Use Your Eyes invites us to look at--and maybe to see for the first time--the world around us, with breathtaking results. Here are the common artifacts of life, often misunderstood and largely ignored, brought into striking focus. With the discerning eye of a painter and the zeal of a detective, Elkins explores complicated things like mandalas, the periodic table, or a hieroglyph, remaking the world into a treasure box of observations--eccentric, ordinary, marvelous.

James Elkins is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of What Painting Is (1998) and Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? (1999), both published by Routledge.

Preface, THINGS MADE BY MAN, 1. How to look at A Postage Stamp, 2. How to look at A Culvert, 3. How to look at An Oil Painting, 4. How to look at Pavement, 5. How to look at An X ray, 6. How to look at Linear B, 7. How to look at Chinese and Japanese Script, 8. How to look at Egyptian Hieroglyphs, 9. How to look at Egyptian Scarabs, 10. How to look at An Engineering Drawing, 11. How to look at A Rebus, 12. How to look at Mandalas, 13. How to look at Perspective Pictures, 14. How to look at An Alchemical Emblem, 15. How to look at Special Effects, 16. How to look at The Periodic Table, 17. How to look at A Map, THINGS MADE BY NATURE, 18. How to look at A Shoulder, 19. How to look at A Face, 20. How to look at A Fingerprint, 21. How to look at Grass, 22. How to look at A Twig, 23. How to look at Sand, 24. How to look at Moths' Wings, 25. How to look at Halos, 26. How to look at Sunsets, 27. How to look at Color, 28. How to look at The Night, 29. How to look at Mirages, 30. How to look at A Crystal, 31. How to look at The Inside of Your Eye, 32. How to look at Nothing, POSTSCRIPT: How Do We Look to a Scallop?, FOR FURTHER READING, FIGURE CREDITS