Simon & Schuster's Guide to Rocks & Minerals

Practical, concise, and easy to use, Simon & Schuster's Guide to Rocks and Minerals contains everything that the rock and mineral enthusiast needs to know. This field guide is divided into two large sections -- one devoted to minerals and one to rocks, each prefaced by a comprehensive introduction that discusses formation, chemistry, and more. All 377 entries, beautifully illustrated with color photographs and helpful visual symbols, provide descriptions and practical information about appearance, classification, rarity, crystal formation, mode of occurrence, gravity of mineral, rock chemistry, modal classification fields, formational environments, grain sizes of rocks, and much more.

Whether you are a serious collector or an information-seeking amateur, this incomparably beautiful, authoritative guide will prove an invaluable reference.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Beautiful pictures & Informative, 2008-10-09
Great pictures of EVERY rock and mineral, a very helpful aspect of this book. Also has informative and thorough text to describe characteristics of minerals.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Simon & Schuster's Guide to Rocks & Minerals, 2008-08-04
Great product...very concise yet covers everything that you need to know about rocks and minerals


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Very Informative, 2007-10-23
A very good boook for information on the properties of crystals, minerals. Includes table of elements which is very helpful. Great for anyone, scientific of metaphysical.


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Super!, 2007-05-30
This is a thick little book. The introduction is detailed, informative, mathematic, and scientific. I learned a lot about how minerals are formed and grow by just reading the intro. The book has great color pictures and the descriptions are placed on the facing pages next to the pics. Shows the mineral's form, specific gravity, rarity, and where the specimen in the pic was found. Also describes the physical properties, occurrence, environment, and uses of the mineral. I especially like the back section 'Introduction to Rocks'. There they talk about the earth's layers of crust, sedimentary processes, volcanic activity, rock collection, meteorites, and generally a whole lot about rocks! Then there is a bunch of pictures of rocks with their descriptions like the mineral section. This is a very handy guide whether collecting in the field, or if you just want to learn about rocks and minerals. Would recommend.


1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

Accuracy of Claims, 2006-12-23
While a reasonably good reference guide, it makes the grievous error of claiming Franklinite and Zincite from Franklin, NJ are "rare". True only if you consider a mineral that was estimated to be "around 800 million tons" to be rare. It was mined in both Franklin and Ogdensburg {Sterling Hill} for over 100 years because it was so plentiful.

These minerals are only rare in the same sense that a Brooklyn, NY phone book is rare.........OUTSIDE of Brooklyn, NY! People on eBay reference this guide to "prove" the rarity of the minerals and it's just WRONG!

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