Special Features

The toys we couldn't resist building: oracles, daily readings, dinner wheels, telegrams and other machinery made from old books.

Your birthstone before the committee got to it — the pre-1912 list, where April was a sapphire.

From A Book of Precious Stones, 1909

Curses, frauds, and the criminal histories of the great stones — sixty of them, each linking into the book.

From A Book of Precious Stones, 1909

Frederic Lucas introduced the dinosaurs to the public — thrillingly, and sometimes very wrongly. The strangest here, each linking to its chapter.

From Animals of the Past, 1901

Pick a creature and see it beside a six-foot person — every measurement the book's own, from Brontosaurus to the Mammoth.

From Animals of the Past, 1901

Kunz’s 1913 birth-stone chapter — the system the jewelers standardized, month by month.

From The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, 1913

A spotting checklist of all 622 species in the library — tick them off as you find them in the wild.

From The Nature Library, 1904

One species a day from the fifteen volumes, plate and all.

From The Nature Library, 1904

Beasts, birds, shells and trees at their most improbable, drawn from fifteen volumes of natural history.

From The Nature Library, 1904