The Purpose of This Book

And here the author would lay strong emphasis on one point, namely, that the average jewel merchant or salesman is badly handicapped in his desire to inform himself regarding "gemology," by the lack of reliable and easily accessible books concerned with matters of the first interest to him. There are, to be sure, books, but they are most of them either too technical or too costly. The jewelry trade has its journals, and the best of these offer valuable special information concerning the science and art of gems and jewelry; but, nevertheless, the business man lacks authoritative books which can be understood by readers not possessed of a scientific education. The desire for a special, yet not too technical, literature often finds a voice in the jewellers' trade journals. For instance, in The National Jeweller and Optician of April, 1908, there is this complaint: "I know men in the hardware and chemical and other lines who have shelves of interesting books about their lines of commerce right at their hands. This is nowhere the case in our downtown jewelry district. In fact, no trade is poorer in books on the trade than the jewelry and silver and art-metal trades." And in the same issue the complaint is repeated. "It is both astonishing and disappointing," says the journal in question, "that a craft of such antiquity and interest as that of jewelry should have virtually no distinctive literature."

The present volume is designed, as far as it may, to supply the lack alluded to, and to give the salesman and the merchant the kind of information which his customers can fairly expect of him.