One of several pocket-sized Golden Guides that lined my shelves back in the day. Each was interesting, small, easy to carry around in a pocket and thumb through without even being connected to the internet. ( )

When I was a boy, we had multiple "Golden Nature Guides", including this guide to minerals, gems, and rocks. As a pocket- sized guide it was ideally suited to the amateur naturalist. Its small color figures were very useful guides to identification.

As compared to our guides to birds and mammals, this guide probably did not get much use in our house. But we would get it out from time to time to identify a rocky treasure brought back from "out west". ( )

One of my all time favorite books as a kid. ( )

Golden Guides is a quaint collection of somewhat useful, pocket-sized field guides for amateurs wishing to delve into a particular field. While the books themselves won’t get you to where you need to be in order to start hitting the fields seriously, they do present a very large coverage over the subject with enough information (some of it potentially outdated!) to point you in the right direction to begin your apprenticeship in the particular field.

In Rocks and Minerals, Herbert S. Zim, the brains behind the series, presents a guide that covers the eponymous subject. It gives the reader enough lingo to be able to understand what mineralogists or geologists are talking about, and enough useful at-home experiments to make rock identification simple.

The series, originally published in the 1950s-1970s has recently been revived. While I’m not sure of the quality of the new books (I’m especially curious as to what their stance is on radioactive materials, something Zim et al. freely encouraged the collection of), I certainly hope that it helps today's amateurs and hobbyists hit the ground at the pace as yesterday’s.

The target audience for such a book may be older children to young adult, but adults could enjoy it as well, especially with their adventurous children. ( )

An identification guide to only the most common knds of rocks and minerals. This guide describes and illustrate their physical and chemical properties, their origin and the geologic structures associated with them, their geologic and economic significance, and where and how to collect them. A handy pocket guide with accurate full-colour illustratins.