This book is not an encyclopedia. You won’t learn everything there is to know about socks. There are only a few words about their history. Only a few about their economics, in an era of globalization that has shifted most of their production to China. Only a few about their geography, even though the refusal to wear socks is sometimes seen as a sign of resistance to the western model.

No, this book’s aim is different, over-ambitious, perhaps. Rather than saying everything there is to say about socks, the idea is to get socks to say what we don’t expect them to, to force them to share their secrets, and to turn them into a way of understanding some of the world’s mysteries.

It just so happens that I enjoy getting objects to talk about themselves. I have already gone on the trail of laundry to decipher how couples function, rummaged through women’s handbags to watch part of their identity being shaped, scrutinized pots and pans to understand how meals make a family.

This time, I intend to make socks talk. And I’m convinced that they have a lot to say.

In a deliberately light-hearted style, Jean-Claude Kaufmann sets out to share his reflections on an object that is often disdained by its users and has been unfairly ignored by both science and literature: socks.