Book Review: Timeless Treasures

Title: Timeless Treasures 

Author: Pamela Elcik

Date: 2023

Publisher: Pamela Elcik

Quote: "For the serious student, the path is endless. The world of beads is vast."

Indeed it is. Beads are among the first artifacts humans learn to make, and among the more durable ones that clearly show human handwork. A history of beads could easily fill volumes.

Which is why this skinny little book is such a disappointment. I had some trouble acquiring it--I asked for it as an advance review copy!--and suspect I acquired the plain text that was pasted into a gorgeous coffee-table book, only. The appeal of the printed book might be in big colorful photos of museum pieces of beadwork, and what I have might be just the "filler."

It reads like "filler" in a series of short magazine articles, the kind of low-content captioning that links photos to advertisements. The photos might tell a reader something about beads that the reader did not already know. The "filler" text probably would not. Beads were used at this place and time, or that one, of historical interest, Elcik tells us, in words that gush admiration of the beads, but she doesn't really tell us who was making and using them. Queen Elizabeth's court wore clothes with valuable tiny beads sewn all over them. You knew that. Paris artisans made bead purses. You knew that; you might be lucky enough to have gone to Paris and bought one. 

Google offered this photo of an antique beaded purse from Antiques Off Broadway, where it probably is or once was for sale. This photo and a few thousands more. 

Though Elcik occasionally uses a beadcraft term like "faience," she doesn't explain it. How would  you know a faience bead from any other bead you might happen to find? You'll have to look it up. Wikipedia says that faience is a general term for finely glazed ceramic pieces, beads and bigger things, found in ancient Egyptian archaeological sites. Elcik doesn't say. Presumably her paragraph that mentions faience beads was meant to be printed beside a picture--but I don't see the picture.

Elcik certainly likes beads and, if this text was printed in a coffee table book, you might feel that the photos delivered your money's worth of artistic beauty and/or artistic inspiration. Her prose is evocative; if you've gone to museums or read art books and seen samples of historic beadcraft, you can at least remember what you've seen.

And I suspect that the copies of this book that I didn't receive last year were lost in the e-mail because they were full of pictures. I know some e-books arrived slowly, were filed as spam, and/or failed to open because they were full of pictures. 

So it may not be entirely Elcik's fault...but I think tighter editing could have made room for more facts, telling me something I didn't know, by cutting back some of the multitude of phrasings the author finds to communicate just "Pretty, pretty!"--even if the photos are the point, and by receiving it as a free book I've missed the point of the book.

I would not recommend that anyone buy what's finally landed in my Kindle. But I suspect that what's in my Kindle is not what you might find in a bookstore, and that readers may love what's in the bookstore.