Simon & Schuster's Guide to Rocks and Minerals

Simon & Schuster's Nature Guide Series

by Simon & Schuster

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.

Genres: Reference

607 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Juli Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful, thorough guide, but a little bit technical for my purposes.

[Haley Buchanan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a pretty good book, probably for some more advanced people looking into a deeper knowledge into rocks and minerals. It came with great pics and well organized descriptions. Personally I had hard time with some of the terms and consistently had to look up terms, but other than that I loved the organization used in this book. It was very easy to find facts. I loved how in the beginning they had the formulas to calculate the mass of a crystals and a guide to all crystal formations. Brightly colored and clearly up to date. I recommenced this book for any advanced geologist looking into a good book to get facts from.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 2 best series on rocks minerals and fossils that i've found for field work are 'Simon & Schuster' and DK.
The photographs in the former are better than in the DK books, but the DK books are better for everything else - user-friendliness of content, detail of content, usefulness of content. The DK books generally offer more examples.

[Lafcadio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just looking at the photographs could make you want to start studying geology.

[Carrie Turner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of information, but some too technical for my purposes.