Mineralogy and Crystallography Books

 
From the invention of movable type printing by Gutenberg around 1450, to the beginning of the X-ray diffraction era in 1912, thousands of books have been published in the fields of mineralogy and crystallography. The purpose of the book collection of the Virtual Museum is to provide an overview of important, influential, but also appealing and desirable works that were published during that period.
We do not show ideal copies, but real books that are described as they are.

Caesius The book collection in the Virtual Museum is arranged by the name of the author in alphabetical order followed by the year of publication (with "nd" for: no date) and the title.

In the individual descriptions of each book, the title page is reproduced as accurately as possible in quasi facsimile manner. Line breaks are indicated by a vertical stroke. The same convention applies to the half-title.

The collation includes the number of volumes (explicitly stated if there is more than a single volume), the format (folio, quarto, octavo,..), the collational formula, the pagination and the number of plates or folding tables.
The collational formula provides a detailed reference system for the parts of the book and is particularly important (but sometimes appears very complex) when describing early books; this aspect is addressed in the standard bibliography textbooks. For pagination, we give a brief description of the numbering that appears on the pages. Unnumbered pages are counted and that number is placed in square brackets. When a blank page is present before or after a group of numbered or unnumbered pages (but not within the group), this is explicitly indicated. Mispagination is only indicated for early books.
If no pagination is present throughout the book, the same shorthand description is applied to the leaves.
The other features of the entries complete the description of our copy.

References

(only bibliographies with detailed descriptions are listed here)

  • Cole, William A. (1988) Chemical Literature 1700-1860. A Bibliography with Annotations, Detailed Descriptions, Comparisons and Locations. Mansell, London
  • Hoover, H.C. (1980) The Herbert Clark Hoover Collection of Mining & Metallurgy. Claremont, California
  • Schuh, Curtis (2007) Mineralogy & Crystallography: An annotated Biobibliography of books published 1469 through 1919. Tucson, Arizona
  • Sinkankas, J. (1993) Gemology An Annotated Bibliography. The Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J. & London
  • Ward, D.C. & Carozzi, A.V. (1984) Geology Emerging. A Catalog Illustrating the History of Geology (1500-1850) from a Collection in the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
 
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