PEARLS Ornament and Obsession <i> By Kristin Joyce and Shellei Addison Introduction by Sumiko Mikimoto (Simon & Schuster: $65; 255 pp.) </i>

It would be sacrilege to say that Dorothy Parker could improve on the meaning of a phrase in the Bible, but in one case she actually did: Parker and Clare Booth Luce were engaged in a running feud. Meeting in a doorway one day, Luce stepped aside for Parker with the stinger, “Age before beauty.” Parker’s famous retort: “Pearls before swine.”

It’s hard to look at the innocent, milky, iridescent beauty of a pearl the same way after reading through this entertaining and informative coffee-table book that devotes itself to the gem favored by the world’s oldest cultures. Authors Kristin Joyce and Shellei Addison dutifully take the reader on a tour through the world of pearls: in history and mythologies from around the world, the politics of pearl fishing (how the European pearl craze led to the the Persian Gulf being completely fished out, for example), the priceless collections of royalty; how pearls have been interpreted and used in adornment and fashion, and celebrated in literature and the arts. You learn how pearls have been harvested and all about Kokichi Mikimoto, “the pearl king,” who devoted his life to the creation of “the cultured pearl” in Japan in the early part of the century.

Unfortunately the book is organized as unimaginatively as a college term paper, broken down into neat, thematic chapters. The text has a shallow ring, as though it all germinated from an article in Victoria magazine. It is clearly not meant to be read cover to cover, as the authors repeat details and information in different chapters. (Do we care enough to read twice that Calvin Klein bought the Duchess of Windsor’s pearls and that his wife Kelly likes to wear them with T-shirts and jeans?)

But “Pearls” belongs to the category of book for leafing through, reading in bits and pieces. It is sumptuously illustrated, with mouth-watering pictures of priceless tiaras, Eastern orthodox icons and necklaces so elaborately pearl-studded it is impossible to calculate their value. The book is indexed, and the authors provide a bibliography as well. And there’s a glossary where you can pick up such professional jewelers’ argot as “baroque,” “Akoya” and “mabe”--good expressions to throw around the next time you go shopping at Van Cleef & Arpels or Cartier.