In 2019, I posted on Facebook about my pearl book collection. Twenty titles at the time.
Today it's closer to 60 — plus a few in PDF — and the shelf shows no signs of stopping. The collection now spans gemological references, trade memoirs, natural history, and a small but important body of early 20th-century pearl literature.
When I get genuinely interested in something, I start with books. Always have. I look for everything available — preferably in print, with photographs, well produced.
My library reflects every obsession I've had: interior design, illustrated children's books, Japanese and Chinese antique furniture, Japanese lacquer miniatures, costume jewelry, Hermès scarves. Some subjects have a whole bookcase. Pearls have their shelf now.
The old ones
There is a small group of books from the Victorian and Edwardian era that pearl people keep coming back to. I have all of them, which still surprises me a little.
The oldest book on the subject in my collection is Pearls and Pearling Life by Edwin W. Streeter, 1886. Streeter was a London jeweler writing about the global pearl trade at its Victorian peak — the Gulf, Ceylon, the Americas. It reads as a document of a world that was about to change completely. Within two decades, Japanese scientists and Mikimoto would begin their experiments. Within three, the natural pearl trade would never recover. I have it in reprint and would love one day to get the first edition with lithographs and expanding map.
Then The Pearl by W.R. Cattelle, 1907 — precise and mercantile, a gemologist and dealer writing for people who buy and sell. And The Book of the Pearl by George Frederick Kunz and Charles Stevenson, 1908 — science, biology, history, art, all of it, written beautifully. Kunz is the one pearl people tend to mention in reverent tones. I have a reprint and an original. The reprint does not do justice to the photographs and plates in the original edition.
And then Pearls and Pearling by Herbert Harvey Vertrees, 1913. Vertrees left his job as a salesman to hunt freshwater pearls in the Illinois River. The book is compact, the illustrations are his own. It also contains, almost in passing, the observation that the sand-grain origin myth had already been disproven by experiments in the 19th century. The myth is still very much alive. I once had to convince my doctor — a sharp and well-read woman — that pearls do not form around grains of sand. We got there eventually.
Both Kunz and Vertrees, incidentally, include photographs of Russian Empress Alexandra Feodorovna in her magnificent pearls. A detail I find quietly wonderful.
The modern equivalent in ambition — though not in prose style — is Pearls by Elisabeth Strack, originally in German, republished in English in 2006. Dense, thorough, long. Also, in places, already dated: nucleated freshwater pearls from China were essentially unthinkable when Strack was writing. Today they are as ordinary as smartphones.
More recent technical and buying guides — particularly by Renée Newman and Antoinette Matlins — are less ambitious but more practical, and reflect how much the market itself has changed.
For natural history in the strictest sense, Pearls: A Natural History by Neil H. Landman, Paula M. Mikkelsen, and colleagues from the American Museum of Natural History and the Field Museum is in a different category entirely. Biology, geology, evolution — and photography of pearl-bearing mollusks across species most people have never heard of. A reminder that the pearl is not primarily a jewelry story. It is a natural history story that jewelry happened to notice.
The historians
Three books that treat pearls as serious historical subjects — not gemology, not buying guides, but scholarship.
Sea of Pearls: Seven Thousand Years of the Industry that Shaped the Gulf by Robert A. Carter (2012) — the Arabian Gulf pearl trade from prehistory through the collapse of the natural pearl market. Rigorous and readable. The best single account of what the Gulf pearl industry actually was. And absolutely gorgeous production!
Jewels from the Sea: Pearl Fishing in the Arabian Gulf by Frances Gillespie (2009) — narrower in scope, closer to the human side: the divers, the merchants, the boats, the season. Complements Carter well.
The Steppe and the Sea: Pearls in the Mongol Empire by Thomas T. Allsen (2019) — pearls as currency, tribute, and political instrument across the Mongol world. A completely different frame. Allsen is a Central Asian historian, not a pearl person, which is exactly what makes this book worth reading.
The adventurers
Some of the best pearl books are not really about pearls. They are about the people who chased them, traded them, fought over them, and occasionally lost everything to them.
Leonard Rosenthal was one of the last great natural pearl traders, operating when natural pearls were still the only pearls. He hunted, he traded, he fought. Most famously, he took Mikimoto to court in both Paris and London, arguing that cultured pearls were imitations and should be labeled as such. He lost. The pearl world moved on. Oh well.
I have three of his books: The Pearl Hunter, The Pearl and I, and The Kingdom of the Pearl. Each one is a different angle on the same obsession. The man could not stop writing about pearls any more than I can stop buying books about them. He is one of my favorite authors on the subject — with a great sense of humor, though his life was, at times, quite tragic. He is the man we can thank for the Champs-Élysées we know today, the portable X-ray machine now a standard in gem laboratories. and the name “cultured pearls.” Did you know that?
Louis Kornitzer is Rosenthal’s natural companion on this shelf. Also a pearl dealer, also from that era, he left behind Pearls and Men and The Pearl Trader. Where Rosenthal is dramatic and self-mythologizing, Kornitzer is shrewder — a merchant’s eye rather than an adventurer’s.
Together they give you the texture of what the natural pearl trade actually felt like from the inside. One lived in Paris, the other in Vienna and London. Fascinating — and hard times.
And then there is Mikimoto, who appears in my library in different forms.
First, his own voice: Japanese Cultured Pearls: A Successful Case of Science Applied in Aid of Nature, 1907, almost immediately translated into English. Part history, part science, part marketing — Mikimoto was a genius businessman who never missed an opportunity. The book ends with advertisements for his shops and photographs of his government awards. Not even slightly subtle, and completely charming.
Second: The Pearl King by Robert Eunson, a biography written by someone who was not Mikimoto. More distance, more skepticism.
Third: Mikimoto by Nick Foulkes, the Assouline edition. Mikimoto as cultural monument — the brand, the aesthetic, the century of influence. A different portrait entirely.
Fourth: Rosenthal, who spent years in court trying to destroy him.
Four sides of the same story on one shelf. I did not plan it that way. It just happened.
The Ultimate Orient: The Quest for the Perfect Pearl by Jacques Branellec sits here too. Branellec co-founded Jewelmer, the South Sea pearl farm in the Philippines responsible for some of the most extraordinary golden pearls in existence. An insider account of building something from nothing in very remote waters. The book is as beautiful to hold as its subject.
The regional ones
Some books are about one type of pearl, or one place, and nothing else.
The Cultured Pearl: Jewel of Japan by Norine C. Reese (1987) — Akoya pearls, the Japanese industry, the culture around it. Dated in places, but that is part of its value.
Black Pearls of Tahiti by Jean-Paul Lintilhac and The Tahitian Pearl as Seen by Creative Jewelers (1997) — two different angles on the same subject. Lintilhac is the industry and the history. The jewelers’ volume is about what designers did with the material once they got their hands on it.
The Pink Pearl: A Natural Treasure of the Caribbean by Hubert Bari (2007) and The Miracle of Golden Pearl by Didier Brodbeck (2007) — conch pearls and golden South Sea pearls respectively. Both are narrow in scope and better for it.
Pearl and the Dragon by Derek J. Content (1999) — Vietnamese pearls and the Oriental pearl trade. The most obscure book on this shelf, and one of the most interesting.
The beautiful ones
Some books are there for information. Others are there because you want them near you.
Splendour & Science of Pearls (2013), edited by GIA’s Donna Dierlamm and Robert Weldon — large format, 149 pages, extraordinary photographs, many by Weldon himself. Science, history, pearls in fashion. This copy was a birthday gift from Robert. I was glad to have it — it was already out of print by then.
The Pearl Necklace (Assouline) is exactly what it sounds like. The pearl necklace as object, icon, and obsession — from royal portraits to fashion photography. The cover alone is worth the shelf space.
People & Pearls: The Magic Endures by Ki Hackney and Diana Edkins — portraits of people who wear pearls, from royalty to artists to ordinary collectors, with the stories behind the pieces. Warm and quietly moving.
Pearls: Ornament and Obsession by Kristin Joyce and Shellei Addison, with an introduction by Sumiko Mikimoto. History, culture, design, generous photography. The title is accurate.
The Pearl by Silvia Malaguzzi (Rizzoli) — pearls in painting, sculpture, and decorative arts across centuries. Why pearls have meant what they have meant to human culture for thousands of years, answered visually.
And the Bari volumes: Pearls by Hubert Bari, and the companion edition co-authored with Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, published with the Qatar Museums. The photography is exceptional. Beautiful to look at, and more substantive than they first appear.
Books that are not only about pearls
Secrets of the Gem Trade by Richard W. Wise is a connoisseur’s guide to precious gemstones — how to look, how to evaluate, how to understand quality beyond standard grading systems. Pearls exist in a gem world, and this book sharpens the eye in ways that pearl-only literature sometimes cannot.
Gempedia by Rui Galopim de Carvalho (2024) is a modern, comprehensive reference on gemstones, structured more like a database than a traditional book. It covers an unusually wide range of gem materials — from the canonical to the obscure — with clear, standardized entries on properties, treatments, and origins. Less narrative than Wise, but useful in a different way: a place to look things up quickly, and to be reminded how large and varied the gem world actually is beyond the familiar names.
If you want just one
People often ask what to read about pearls. My honest answer: not much — at least not in a way that builds real understanding quickly. The subject is a niche within a niche, and serious books about it are rarer than good pearls themselves. What exists in English fits on one shelf — which is convenient, because that is exactly where mine live.
Pearl Buying Guide: How to Identify and Evaluate Pearls by Renée Newman (2017 edition). Compact, paperback, full of photographs. History, pearl types, practical buying information. Unpretentious and useful. This is the one I used to point people to first. Today I would also suggest her latest Pearls (2025), or another excellent book from a fellow pearler in the UK — Wendy Graham’s Pearls: A Practical Guide (2021).
Some books I read once and put away satisfied. Others I keep returning to, not because I have forgotten them but because they continue to offer something different depending on what I am looking for at the time.
Kunz, for obvious reasons — it contains everything, and it rewards rereading in a way that few reference works do, because the prose is good enough to read for its own sake, not just for the information. Strack, when I need to check something specific and want an answer I can trust. Rosenthal, when I want to be reminded that the pearl trade was not always polite, and that the people who shaped it were complicated, driven, and occasionally quite funny about it.
And then a few that are less obvious. Carter, for the clarity he brings to a history that is easy to romanticize and harder to understand. Landman, for the perspective that comes from remembering that pearls existed for hundreds of millions of years before anyone thought to put them in a necklace. Bari, for the visual memory of what exceptional pearls actually look like — which is something that words, however precise, cannot fully carry.
What’s still missing
There are still gaps — regional studies, trade publications, and a substantial body of work in Japanese, French, and German that is not easily accessible.
Two PDFs fill some of that: Pearl Culture in Japan by Dr. A.R. Cahn (1949), a detailed industry study from the postwar period, and Pearl Standard (2025), very much of the present moment. A few special publications from National Geographic and Smithsonian do as well.
What exists in English is limited — which makes collecting it, and understanding it, all the more interesting.
If you know of a serious pearl book not on this list, in any language, I want to hear about it.