Simon & Schuster's Guide to Gems and Precious Stones | 
 enlarge | Author: Simon & Schuster
Creator: Kennie Lyman
Publisher: Fireside
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
Buy Used: $2.99
You Save: $14.01 (82%)
New (30) Collectible (3) from $8.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 104877
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 4.6 x 0.9
ISBN: 0671604309
Dewey Decimal Number: 553.8
EAN: 9780671604301
ASIN: 0671604309
Publication Date: March 13, 1986
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy!
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Product Description
Simon & Schuster's Guide to Gems and Precious Stones provides both the connoisseur and the casual collector with a compact, easy-to-use volume describing more than 100 rare varieties of minerals whose beauty and mystery have possessed our imaginations from time immemorial. More than 450 brilliant photographs accompany profiles of each gem, covering such aspects as appearance, physical properties -- density, hardness, refraction -- occurrence, and how to judge quality and value. Additional sections describe the process of cutting gemstones and the techniques professional gemologists use to evaluate a stone's weight and optical properties.Detailed and comprehensive, this book is essential for anyone interested in the study of gems and precious stones.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Excellent book on gemstone August 12, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to learn about the physical properties of gemstones. It would be especially useful to students interested in the scientific properties of gems. I found it useful because it describes where gemstones are found and how and when they were discovered. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the subject.
The Old Ones are sometimes still the Best July 22, 2007
This books been around for quite a number of years now but has to be simply the BEST illustrated book on Gems there is. It's absolutely jam packed FULL of all the information you need to learn about precious stones.
 Underwhelmed January 4, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Well written but a bit out of date. Scientific data often ages like egg salad on a warm day.
Simon & Schuster's Guide to Gems and Precious Stones January 3, 2007
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
an encyclopedia of knowledge on stones and gems.
its my 10th gem book June 27, 2006
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
and it is a little more technical than the rest (explains things like twinning, establishment of density, calculating specific gravity, cleavage, moh's scale, refractive indices, law of refraction, genesis, cutting, cutting styles etc).
it includes gem descriptions in much detail (thou the order in which they are arranged is a mystery to me and really bugs me, as i have to flip and flip until i find what i need).
for diamond it includes a table comparing 4 color grading systems used (which is cool).
large section on organic gems and synthetics.
all in all i see it as a really good (almost) professional level book on gems and precious stones.
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