Curious Lore of Precious Stones

This is a book about what humans have believed, feared, hoped for, and dreamed when they held a colored stone in their hand. George Frederick Kunz, the legendary gemologist who built Tiffany's famed collection, spent decades gathering every scrap of legend, superstition, medical prescription, religious invocation, and magical practice that peoples across the world had attached to sapphires, rubies, emeralds, and the humbler stones besides. The result reads like an archaeologist of the imagination sifting through the sediment of centuries: the Babylonians who sealed their bargains with blood-red carnelian, the medieval Christians who believed the sardonyx could summon angels, the Hindu astrologers who matched gems to planetary positions, the Edwardian ladies who refused to wear opals unless the moon was favorable. Kunz documents it all with a Victorian empiricist's rigor and an antiquarian's wonder, creating a vast tapestry of what people have made these small, beautiful, rare things mean.