John Berger. 
 
Pantheon: 1980. First American Edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Minor scuffing and smudging on the jacket. Fading across the top on the inside panels. Fold on the front flap. A little bit of trace foxing on the top edge of the text block. One bump across the bottom of the back board. 198 pages. Jacket is very good, book is near fine. 
 
The book's its title, a search for meaning in looking and what happens to the thing looked at. Berger describes the process by which a sixteenth-century masterpiece he saw in the 1960s comes to look quite different to him a decade later. He discusses how a forest looks to a woodcutter; how fields look to peasants; how the world looks to a nineteenth-century barber's son; how New York looked to shiploads of immigrants; and how each of these perspectives was reflected in the struggles of a particular moment. Every painting he considers, whether by Milet, Courbet, Turner, Magritte, Fasanella, or Francis Bacon, is evidence to him of an experience which belongs as fully to life as to art. 
 
"Suddenly an experience of disinterested observation opens in its centre and gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognisable as your own. The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your life."