59 Books Like Fluorescence

The Collector's Book of Fluorescent Minerals is the first illustrated book on the subject. It came out in 1983 and is by Manuel Robbins. The book originally sold for $45, but now it fetches $175 or more when you can find it (Amazon sometimes has it available - the latest price was over $300). It is a great reading book with stories about the miners and the early discovery of the fluorescence in rocks in the Franklin and Sterling Hill mines. An arcing electric spark caused the stones on the sorting table (called the Picking Table) to glow in colors. The miners found that the rocks that glowed green contained zinc while the rocks that glowed red did not. A fellow named Tom Warren obtained a barrel of rocks from the Franklin mine and perfected his company's UV lamps to become portable mineral UV lamps. This improved the mine's ability… show more.

Rainbow Minerals is the best bargain for $6.95 by Bob Jones (printed by Tom Warren). It can be tougher to find, but is sometimes available on eBay. It has a small group of color photos.

Ultraviolet Light and Fluorescent Minerals is also a pretty good read. It is a good general overview of the subject and nicely covers the field of fluorescent activators. It doesn't have many color photographs. It was written by 4 experts in the field including the late, great Thomas Warren (he passed away in 2001) who invented the portable SW mineral lamp. Another one of my favorite guys is Earl Verbeek. He is friendly and knows his rocks. He is the curator of the Sterling Hill Mining Museum. That is the complete list of books on Fluorescent minerals, not including my two books.

This book has been criticized for not including enough different locations of fluorescent minerals (which, here, are centred mainly around North America and Greenland), but personally, I think it is enough to make a start - it all depends where we are on, in our journey! 

Myself, I’m most stunned by the amazing photographs, which occupy a large portion of the book - showing various minerals under UV light (which, incidentally, is not the “UV light” that we know from parties) in a completely different context. This world is all around us, and yet most of us make no attempt to even know it. Has anyone done tours of underground caves under these lighting conditions, yet? And, if not, why not?

This book is such a fun example of taking something that could be seen as a limitation (for instance, the fact that you can only draw worms) and turning it into something more. The book is narrated by the author/illustrator, who explains that he can only draw worms. 

He then introduces a cast of worms and tells us about their various adventures. But whenever he describes something non-worm-like (Worm Six is riding on a flying unicorn!) he quickly reminds us that he can’t draw those things, because he can only draw worms. Never fails to get my kids laughing!

Since long before the modern version of glitter was created—and continuing right up to the present, alongside the plastic stuff—mica has been a major source of sparkle for people all over the world.

But given the amount of ground (no pun intended) that we cover in our book, we were limited in how much detail we could go into about the mineral itself. This photo-rich, highly browsable, well-indexed geological guide for young rockhounds and others with minerals on their minds will come in handy for readers who want to know more about mica.

This is a lovely, lyrical book that mixes poetic language and hard scientific facts. And it’s all supported with some of the most beautiful art I’ve ever seen in a picture book. The spread describing comets, meteorites, and asteroids is particularly wonderful. The book is part of a series that also includes: An Egg is Quiet, A Seed is Sleepy, and A Butterfly is Patient.

Its nearly 200 photograph-packed pages provide a sense of the astounding range of what makes our world shine.

One of my favorite things about researching glitter was considering why substances and creatures and other objects that glimmer and glow are so appealing to humans, regardless of what causes that sparkle. Some of the territory covered by this book (the cover itself offers a couple of hints) is also addressed in my books, but there’s lots more that I didn’t explore.

For readers especially interested in the bling of things, this book is a great next step.

Robert Sardello is a founding member of the School of Spiritual Psychology. He champions the concept that you can work on a much deeper level with crystals  by engaging with them intuitively and acknowledging that they have a consciousness 

I was recommended to read this book when I first started working with one of my publishers. It was lovely to read a book that didn’t “dumb down” crystal healing and encouraged the reader to delve more deeply into the energies that crystals hold for us to use. 

I loved this book because it gave me other perspectives that I hadn't heard before, such as how Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung acknowledged crystals for their qualities, albeit in different ways. Sardello coined the term Earth Angels to describe what crystals do for us, and I love that. 

I just love the type of book that gets kids started in the sciences—bold, showy, and full of inspiring colour pictures, maps, and diagrams, and that’s just how the Rocks and Minerals Pathfinder has been designed—even the photos shot specifically by Weldon Owen for this book feature kids—kids collecting rocks, kids holding massive gold nuggets and kids sitting next to gemstone crystals as big as themselves. I’ve inspired my own kids by taking them around the world with me on geology field trips but these big, bright pathfinders books are the next best thing.