Arizona

This full-color, beautifully illustrated book focuses on the amethysts of Catalan country in Uruguay. In both English and German, Amethyst Uruguay details the past 200 years of the mining of these precious purple stones and of the people and cultures involved in those operations. It also includes fascinating analysis of the geology and mineralogy of the amethyst. The highlight, of course, is a generous series of richly colored photographs of these beautiful gems. Author Reinhard Balzer collects and studies gems and minerals, with a particular interest in amethysts.

The author of this booklet, Dr. Robert Miller Spaulding, Jr., aka “Dr. Bob,” was a 90-year-old professor of Japanese history at Oklahoma State University. Originally from Alabama and Mississippi, he briefly served as an Army Officer (like the librarian at the National Postal Museum, where this book is housed). The Army sent him to school to learn Japanese, and then sent him to Japan in 1946. Dr. Spaulding published many professional books on Japanese history. He was also a philatelist, and was an active member of The International Society for Japanese Philately.

This book is a comprehensive guide to zoo management covering all key aspects of the field. It includes beautiful photographs, both color and black-and-white, plus illustrations and charts. This book is used by Zoo curators and keepers as a reference guide for their work. It also serves as an excellent training guide for interns, volunteers, and new hires by providing a thorough introduction to the field. The authors embrace the precepts of modern zoo management science, encouraging a real appreciation for natural diversity, conservation, and its modern challenges.

So who authors an important scholarly work on early Chinese jades; maps the main prison camps in Germany and Austria during WWI; writes biographies about Anna Van Schurman, Agnes Strickland, Edgar Allan Poe, and Charles Dickens; writes first-hand accounts of talks of rebel leaders during Ireland’s revolutionary period; and is appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire? That would be the scholar par excellence of Renaissance art John Pope-Hennessy’s mother. 

In 1941, Max Miller financed an expedition the length of the Baja Peninsula with two natural history scientists from the San Diego Natural History Museum, Frank Gander and Laurence Huey. Miller mentions briefly and ominously of the Japanese submarine presence in Magdalena Bay on the Baja Peninsula in the months prior to Pearl Harbor. 

Marie Cuttoli (1879-1973) was a collector and patron of modern French art. Additionally, she was responsible for reviving the art of tapestry weaving and carpet making in the modern era and the practice of commissioning tapestries to reproduce paintings, as had been a custom during the Renaissance. She commissioned designs from modern—especially Cubist—painters Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.

Charles Alphonse Combes (1891-1968), born in Paris, moved to the Côte d’Ivoire in 1925 and never looked back. He began taking art students and in 1937 his studio became the École des Arts Appliques, the first art school in the country. It is now a museum in Abidjan, Musée Charles Alphonse Combes.