National Audubon Society Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals: North America

I have ad my copy for many years and reference it very frequently. it contains hundreds of color photos and and an excellent text article for each mineral species. It would not be possible to create a field guide that is all-inclusive but this book is as close to that lofty goal as is practical. It is a field guide and is necessarily compact and totable. But note that it has over 700 pages including photos. The information is pretty much timeless, so the date of publication matters little. I don't think there is a book available on rocks and minerals of such overall utility and quality. All of the Audubon guides are superb- I just ordered one on mushrooms for our oldest daughter who has an interest in mycology. I have the North American Trees book and it is similarly excellent. You just can't do better for the money.

Full color pictures

My interest in the subject of rocks and minerals is both scientific and spiritual. For me, the best book that introduced me to the subject with easy to understand scientific and spiritual use descriptions as well as the requisite gorgeous color photography is "Crystals" by Jennie Harding. I would highly recommend this book as a beginners book for both its scientific and spiritual perspectives. But as you get hungry for more, then's the time to purchase the Audubon book. From a solely scientific perspective, besides so many helpful photos, descriptions, glossary of terminology, etc., there are detailed sections on minerals/crystals and stone (granites, horneblends, etc.) Filled with technical but very helpful details on identification and collection, if you want to investigate the subject from strictly an academic or collector's pov, make this your initial purchase.

Probably one of the best books I could have bought for my rock counting has just about everything. I need to look up very informative for the rocks. I’m looking for just a great book. I would recommend everybody put one in their library. Even for a beginner like me, this is by far become one of my favorites to go to.

The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Rocks and Minerals is a beautiful book packed full of information. The guide, including index, is 850 pages, with over 250 full color pages featuring pretty much every rock and mineral you will come across in North America. The regular pages are very thin, similar to the paper bibles are printed on. This thin paper is very flimsy and may not hold up well to the kind of abuse it would take if you actually carried it in the field. The thiness also allows the print on the other side to show through, making it difficult to read sometimes. The print is especially small, contributing to some readability problems. The information is most certainly complete, though. The first 48 pages talk about the various characteristics that are used to identify minerals. It includes brief descriptions of the characteristics and in some cases line drawings. The next section is a "visual key" to minerals. The minerals are arranged by color and form. A small icon at the edge of the pages allows you to quickly flip through the key to find the type of mineral you are looking for. For instance, if you found something orange and globular you can quickly fan through the pages using your thumb until you see the appropriate icon. Then you can look at beautiful pictures of minerals that match those characteristics. The specimen pictures really are beautiful, but probably are not particularly useful. They are all gorgeous museum quality specimens that likely will not look like anyting you find in the field. But it does help you narrow it down to a list of suspects, and then you can go on from there. The plates include the mineral name and the page number where you will find the more useful information. There is also a "descriptive key" in case you don't want to use the images. This is probably the most useful part of the book. It allows you to take information you have gathered about your mineral--including color, hardness, cleavage, and form--and quickly reference it. This section is organized by hardness and color. Once you have your suspect this section refers you to the pages where you can find more information about these minerals. The information section is very thorough. It not only presents the various physical and chemical characteristics of the mineral, but also tells you where the mineral is likely to be found and what other types of minerals would be found in the same area. That information is very useful for ruling out suspects. The next section is on rocks. The arrangement is very similar. Information about the various characteristics of rocks is presented at the beginning of the section, followed by a visual key. Unlike the mineral section, however, there is not a section with a descriptive key. The visual key references to information pages that are just as thorough as the mineral pages. At the end there is a brief section on rock and mineral collecting and the environments in which various minerals are found. The appendices also include interesting information, including a glossary and information about rock-forming minerals, as well as a list of chemical abbreviations. The index is alphabatized by rock and mineral names and allows to quickly reference a specific rock or mineral you may be curious about. The information is excellent. The arrangement is logical and intuitive. The pictures, whether useful or not, are stunning. My only complaint about this field guide is that it is a little bit awkward. The pages are about 3.5" wide and 7.5" tall, and the book is approximately 1.25" inches thick. The thickness makes it a little difficult to handle, especially when you first get it and the binding is still tight. I would have liked it to be a little thinner. The beautiful pictures are three to a page and quite large (you can look at all the minerals in "look inside this book" thing here at Amazon). I think the pictures could have been equally as effective if made a little smaller and presented 6 to a page. That would have reduced the page count by more than 150 pages and made it a little easier to handle. That being said, I really can't complain. The fact that Audubon was able to fit this much information into such a compact volume is really impressive. I do recommend anyone with troubled vision to get a magnifying glass (or loupe!) with this purchase, though.

Handy

First off, the vinyl cover makes this book a superior field guide because it can actually survive the field environment, unlike many others. The next great feature of this guide is the picture section in the middle of the book. It breaks the minerals down into color groups (green, red, metallic, etc) and then shows high quality photos of the different minerals. The quality of the photos is incredible, the only downside is that there is nothing in the photograph for scale. You cannot tell if the mineral you are looking at is 4 mm across or 4 inches. The third and perhaps most valuable feature is the identification chart. Like the photographs, this is broken down by color first. Within each color, the minerals are listed in order of increasing hardness. Then a list of identifying characteristics is listed for each mineral. For example, you have a green mineral of about 4-4.5 in hardness, the book lists fluorite as having perfect octahedral cleavage, smithsonite as having rhombohedral cleavage and reacting to dilute acid, and austinite is bladed or accicular. Pick which description matches your sample and you have identified your mineral. On both the photo section and the identification chart, each mineral also has the page number where you can read a further description of your mineral. The major flaw in the descriptions is the lack of optical data, but this is only a short coming if you will be looking at samples in thin section on a regular basis.

This is a beautifully informative book. It will take me many years to go through every piece of information in this book. If you're a rock hound like myself, you will love this book. I love that it also has pictures! It is probably one of the best rock books I have. It was gifted to me, and I absolutely love it and have learned so much since I received it. A total must for the lover of rocks and pebbles. CONS: The only real downfall with the book is that my aging do not like how small the print is. It's really small, in my opinion.

Excellent book in terms of content. However, print quality of this edition is much poorer than the older edition I have from twenty years ago. Images on colour plates are not as crisp, colours are muted and the contrast is flatter. Also, text on black and white pages is not as crisp.

This is the best rock book I’m so glad I bought it. So many color photos with an in depth description of each rock, etc. These books by Audubon are always the best books we have many of their titles. They are worth their weight in gold. I keep mine in a zip lock bag in my backpack for adventures. Highly recommended!

This is awesome! I am so addicted to flipping through it to identify different finds. I like that the minerals are sorted by colour, but the descriptions are sorted by composition so you have to do a lot of flipping back and forth. Good pictures and just a ton of information. I am a beginner so I have a lot of learning to do; but I imagine it would be very useful to experienced rock hounds as well.

No se nota que este libro lo hayan hecho con cariño. Le falta amor. Como si lo hubieran tenido que hacer a fuerza. Fotos muy viejas, obsoletas, de muy baja calidad, pierdas raras e imposibles de encontrar en la naturaleza. No propone nada de nada.