rock

This stunningly illustrated book is the work of distinguished German mineralogist Gustav Adolph Kenngott (1818-1897). Particularly interested in crystallography, Kenngott was the first to describe enstatite, a rare green mineral which can be cut as a gemstone. This volume is a distillation of his work intended for “the visual instruction of the young in school and with family.” In addition to its gorgeous multi-colored plates, it is significant in that it remains in its original pictorial binding, complete with advertisements for other natural history books!

This multiple was created by George Maciunas, ostensible leader of the avant-garde movement Fluxus, in conjunction with Yoko Ono’s 1971 retrospective This is Not Here at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Yoko Ono, artist, peace activist, and widow of John Lennon has used smiles as a recurring theme since the 1960s. "It is the simplest thing to make yourself healthy and make others feel good," she says about smiling.

The author of this book, Arnold Shaw (1909–1989) was a songwriter, pianist, composer, and music publisher who wrote a dozen books on 20th century pop music, including two books on Frank Sinatra and a biography of African American pop sensation Harry Belafonte. He founded the Arnold Shaw Popular Music Research Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1985 and taught there for a decade. This 600-page long guide to the history of R&B has eight parts, with seven chapters each. Those chapters are broken out into 25 sections each, which are called grooves.

“Writers of mystery stories often have to cast about for the key elements of an intriguing story […] I did not go looking for these critical ingredients of the story of the Tucson Meteorite. They came to me.” states Richard R. Willey in his forward to this short but thorough book. This book explores every aspect of the Meteorites – from their original descent to Earth, their mineral composition, to their use as anvils by American Indians and frontiersmen alike, to their name as a specimen, and the history of how they came to be in the Smithsonian.

There is a commonly held superstition that illicitly removing specimens of petrified wood from Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park is bad luck. As a result, the National Park Service receives many of these returned rocks with “conscience letters” of regret from over the years. The letters have been carefully archived and the purloined samples are now in a “conscience pile” at the end of the park property. The rocks cannot be distributed on the park land as the exact provenance for each piece can never be known, and areas need to be kept as pristine as possible for future research.