New Book: Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story

Consider this new book to be 'on the slant' since it isn't directly about fairy tales but is a memoir about antique collecting, specifically about a mirror featuring images from Aesop's The Fox and the Grapes carved into its frame, this book is a nice first cousin once removed to our usual topics. Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story by Maryalice Huggins came out this week. I discovered it through some of its online publicity which I will share below.

First, I discovered this article about the book with some ruminations about mirrors that bring to mind Snow White and other fairy tales indirectly at least.

‘Mirror, mirror on the wall’ — Huggins’ book reflects upon a quest for a mirror’s provenance by Gloria S. Redlich

Huggins glimpsed herself in the mirror, which she ended up purchasing for over $8,000, at two angles. “Something mysterious,” she notes, “seemed to be taking place.” She recalls the words from a study on antique mirrors: “From antiquity onward, mirrors were believed empowered to capture the souls of those reflected in their lifetimes.” Had hers been thus ensnared?

Mirrors, she writes, “are fanciful … a mirror never lies. They reflect how we feel about ourselves in every possible way.”

Huggins’ new mirror then takes her on an odyssey that is at once historic, not a little fantastical, and also, if incidentally, a road to self-discovery.

Another great article, more about the author this time, Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall by Mimi Read:

Ms. Huggins’s book fits into no recognizable genre: it is partly a memoir about growing up on Block Island, an evocative re-creation of the lives of an illustrious 19th-century American family, a detective story about the provenance of an object, and a rare glimpse behind the curtain of the politely conniving, overwhelmingly male world of high-end antiques. There’s also a history of mirrors slipped in. (Apparently, our deep-seated desire to behold our reflections existed eons before technological advances finally made it as easy as whipping out a compact.)

Her story starts in the mid-1990s. One day, she played hooky from her restoration studio in Chelsea to attend an auction in rural Rhode Island. The musty contents of a house were being sold off, and Ms. Huggins arrived with no money, thinking she’d just enjoy the chance to glimpse an immaculate horse farm.

Among the inventory, Ms. Huggins spied something that ignited her object lust: a filthy eight-foot-tall Rococo Revival mirror too big and nutty to attract decorators and most collectors. A giant golden romp of a thing, its chipped gilt frame was decorated with broken carvings based on Aesop’s fable “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Playful and naïve, the carvings jutted out extravagantly, luring her into their narrative.

The article also included this photo by Erik Jacobs for The New York Times:


And, here's a description from the publisher, Macmillan:

“Everything I needed to know about Fox and Grapes mirror, I knew the moment I first I saw it.”

What antiques restorer Maryalice Huggins knew when she stumbled across the mirror at a country auction in Rhode Island was this: She was besotted. Rococo and huge (more than eight feet tall), the mirror was one of the most unusual objects she had ever seen. Huggins had to have it.

The frame’s elaborate carvings were almost identical to a famous eighteenth-century design. Could this be eighteenth-century American? That would make it rare indeed. But in the rarefied world of American antiques, an object is not significant unless you can prove where it’s from. Huggins set out to trace the origins of her magnificent mirror.

Fueled with the delightfully obsessive spirit of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Aesop’s Mirror follows Huggins on her quest as she goes up against the leading lights of the very male world of high-end antiques and dives into the historical archives. And oh, what she finds there! The mirror was likely passed down through generations of the illustrious Brown family of Providence, Rhode Island.

Throughout history, mirrors have been seen as having mystical powers, enabling those who peer into them to connect the past and the future. In Aesop’s Mirror, Maryalice Huggins does just that, creating a marvelous, one-of-kind book about a marvelous, one of-a-kind American treasure.

The reviews are positive so far, such as this blurb:

“A surprisingly complex story of American beginnings . . . In an age in which art’s bottom line is generally thought to be the bottom line, the book attests to the true reasons we cherish rare objects that have come down to us from the past: the way they elicit our desire to possess their beauty and their mystery.”

—Benjamin Moser, Harper’s Magazine

The book also interests me because it follows the journey of trying to learn, the need to find answers, to understand, the joys and tribulations of research in general--all experiences I relate to when I research fairy tales and their histories. I've been rabidly working on a Sleeping Beauties collection (including Sleeping Beauty and an even greater abundance of Snow White tales) this past month and the quests for tales and more information has been quite heady. But more about that in a few weeks when the collection is complete...

Guess Aesop's Mirror goes on my wish list...