Sock (Object Lessons) - Softcover

Kim Adrian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501315064 ISBN 13: 9781501315060

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies-vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed.

Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this floppy, often smelly, sometimes holey piece of clothing, whether machine-made or hand-knit, can also serve as an anatomy lesson, a physics primer, a love letter, a weapon, a fetish, and a fashion statement.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

About this title

About the Author

Kim Adrian is the author of the memoir The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet and the editor of The Shell Game: An Anthology of 'Hermit Crab' Essays. She is a Visiting Lecturer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

From the Back Cover

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Homely, ubiquitous, simple: the sock is such an everyday part of our lives, we tend to overlook its importance-unless there's a problem. Without socks, our feet are vulnerable to cold, infection, and discomfort. Put on a pair that's too thin, too thick, too itchy, holey, or damp and suddenly socks are maddeningly preoccupying. At their most basic, socks are an important technology of adaptation, without which human beings would not have migrated to many of the colder regions of the planet. Sometimes functional, sometimes fashionable, sometimes government issued, and often silly looking, the humble sock can be said to complete the human foot.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501315064
• ISBN 13: 9781501315060
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160