S. Worthen | Weblog

I have to say, more work has been done and more books have been published on everything on this list other than eyeglasses. The eyeglasses material is largely in articles and exhibition catalogs, rather than books. Lots of work has been done on the subject by serious amateurs, so lots of the articles appear in things like ophthamology journals. At the moment, I'd say, Frugoni's 20 or 30 pages on the history of eyeglasses it by far as good as it gets for good, accessible, still-for-sale materials in books. Oh, there's also lots on the history of optics, so if you like dabbling in the sciences or math, you could pursue it from that angle quite productively. Obviously, that doesn't mean eyeglasses aren't worth working on - indeed, it means you're more likely not to have everyone else in your class working on them as well. Anyways, not all of the articles on the subject are as inaccessible as the Rosen one is currently for you, and as long as you have time for interlibrary loan, that's not a problem either. There are a number of relevant articles available via JSTOR as well.

By the way, I figured out where the other summary of Rosen's article was, and it probably isn't of any help to you. A Spectacle of Spectacles: Exhibition Catalogue. (Edition Leipzig, 1988), put together by Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung Jena for a 1988-9 exhibition on the history of eyeglasses. One of the catalog essays has about a page of summary of the Rosen article.