The Mineralogical Record, Mar/Apr 2005
The ExtraLapis English No. 5 publication on Gold was one of the biggest sellers at the Mineralogical Record tables during the 2004 Tucson Show, keeping pace respectably even with Bob Jones’ new book on the 50-year history of the Tucson Show and the 2004 edition of Fleischer’s Glossary of Mineral Species. Yes, of course, this is partly because 2004 was the “Year of Gold” at Tucson, and partly because of the eternal mystique of “the noble mineral” itself, but surely the new book was popular also because the ExtraLapis English productions (which are really individual books rather than journal issues) have by this time acquired a mystique of their own, for their beauty, informativeness, and lively presentation.
Indeed, each new ExtraLapis English seems to be more alluring than the previous one, and presents the reader with its own set of little surprises: the approach to topics remains flexible, almost playfully so, from book to book. A new set of authors and even of editors takes charge each time, and in this new book, sure enough, the author-list of the 19 chapters amounts to a roll call of gold experts of various kinds, and on the editing team Dr. Robert B. Cook (from academe) and Edward R. Coogan (gold prospector extraordinaire) join general-series editors Dr. Günther Neumeier and Gloria Staebler. The chapters are clearly conceived and straightforwardly titled: gone this time is the somewhat squishy organization and over-cute topic rubrics of which I complained in my review of extraLapis English No. 4, on Calcite. And yet the march of chapter-subtopics through the book retains the element of creative “surprise” when we encounter, say, a chapter (by Gary Mason) on “Gold Records,” on the biggest/deepest/oldest/most valuable etc. gold-related phenomena, or a chapter (by Wayne Leicht) on aesthetic evaluation of gold specimens, or a chapter called “The British Gold Rush of 1854,” which its author, Mick Cooper, knows perfectly well most readers will begin in a “Really?? Never heard of that before...” spirit.
In fact, I don’t want to list all the chapter titles in order, for fear of spoiling the eclectic fun, and will settle instead for an overview. We read of the history of man’s fascination with gold, from times more ancient than Old Kingdom Egypt (“Gold and Man: Since the Dawn of Civilization,” by Karl-Ludwig Weiner) to the contemporary period of gold prospecting with metal detectors (“The Great Electronic Gold Rush,” by Edward R. Coogan and Robert B. Cook). The great gold rushes of history are limned, and, along the way, the geology and mining history of famous gold provinces (“Gold Fever in the Southeastern USA,” by Chris Tacker; “California and All That Is Golden,” by Wayne Leicht; “Australian Gold: Mega-Nuggets from Down Under,” by Dermot Henry and Bill Birch; “The Rush for Gold Turns North to Canada and Alaska,” by Mark Mauthner; “Farncomb Hill: Colorado’s Finest Gold Specimens,” by Ed Raines). Basic science gets done in chapters like “What is Gold?” by Karl-Ludwig Weiner; “Gold Deposits—an Overview,” by Karen L. Webber, Rupert Hochleitner and Robert B. Cook; and “The Mineralogy of Gold—a Review,” by Stefan Weiss (this last, which describes all known gold-essential mineral species, is an update to Wendell Wilson’s similar listing back in the Mineralogical Record’s first Gold Issue in 1982). And finally there are “surprise” chapters on topics like gold pseudomorphs (Dave Ellis), gold mining and investment (Hans-Gert Bachmann), the testing of gold (Hans-Gert Bachmann), and the uses of gold in medicine (Jamie Spiller, a high school student, and clearly a very bright one, from Massachusetts).
Everywhere—not just in the “Gold Records” chapter but throughout the book—we hit gold factoids that fascinate. The total volume of all the gold ever mined is equivalent to a 19.6-meter cube, or the volume of a small apartment building. The famous “Dragon” gold specimen from the Colorado Quartz mine was first located by a metal detector. The largest known single mass of gold was a 3,000-ounce specimen found in 1872 in an Australian mine. India now has more gold (including jewelry gold) within its boundaries than does any other country. And do not neglect to ogle the Jeff Scovil photograph of Dave Bunk’s amazing 3.5-cm crystal group of the rare gold/lead/antimony sulfo-telluride nagyagite from Sacaramb (formerly Nagyag), Romania.
Beautiful photographs and clear graphics, a stout binding and good, heavy, slick paper, and a general bibliography with about 100 titles, all help to complete the success of this effort. Errors of fact seem few, although a reviewer must carp at one photo caption (on p. 23) which places the Peabody Museum at Harvard (it is at Yale), and I hope that the copyeditors will bear in mind, for next time, the fact that the past tense of the verb lead is led, not lead (when lead rhymes with “head” it’s a noun, denoting the metallic element); a few other mechanical glitches occur as well. But if by this time you have developed a craving to buy up new issues of ExtraLapis English as they appear, there is no reason now—less than ever—to kick the habit.
-Thomas P. Moore
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