CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/12/2019

Magic, protection and undeniable beauty in "Wild Beads of Africa"

Featured image is reproduced from Wild Beads of Africa, a book unlike any other on our list, and a staff favorite at the SHOPPE OBJECT 3.0 Home & Gift Show closing today in New York. Presenting the astonishing old powderglass bead collection of songwriter Billy Steinberg, it is the first book dedicated to the nineteenth-century beads made by the Ashanti and Ewe people of Ghana and Togo from finely-ground, recycled glass. In West Africa, they are regarded as magical, according to essayists John and Ruth Picard, and “worn proudly as a symbol of prestige and wealth. Their protective powers are well known, somewhat equivalent to the dZi beads of Tibet.”