For millennia, minerals and gemstones have been gathered and traded from the countries surrounding present-day Pakistan. While the Karakoram Mountains hosted portions of the Silk Road and other routes over which gems and minerals were traded, Pakistan's magnificent gem deposits were for the most part left undiscovered until the 20th century. Since then, a few daring miners, collectors and dealers have challenged the extreme climate, daunting terrain and rocky political landscape to bring the world some of its finest mineral treasures. No. 6 in the popular extraLapis English mineralogical monograph series, Pakistan - Minerals, Mountains & Majesty is packed with unmatched locality information, detailed maps, stories behind the finds and of course unforgettable photographs.

Pakistan: Minerals, Mountains & Majesty

Si & Ann Frazier

Dudley Blauwet

Bernhard Grasemann

C. Beesley

Erich Draganits

Tyler Funk

Vera Hammer

Lapis International, LLC

Precious opal is a rainbow made tangible. Its spectral blaze of color moves, changes, intensifies, fades, or disappears with the slightest change in perspective. Opal's intriguing play of color and unique atomic arrangement have made it the subject of scientific probing from early optics in the 1850s to high tech photonics today. Equally challenging has been discovering opal's place in history. Its beauty begs to be enshrined in myth and legend when facts are as scarce as the stone itself. Opal, both precious and common, is found in disparate environments fro the unbearable heat of the Australian outback to the higher elevations of the Canadian Rockies, from a centuries-old site in Slovakia to a number of little known places in the American west. An unique assortment of characters collect and mine this equally individual stone, of which no two are exactly alike. Thus blazing gem of chemical simplicity--just silica and water--has ignited a complexity of human emotions: a compulsion to mine, the desire to wear, an urge to fashion, the challenge to imitate, a need to possess. A natural, wearable stone with magical depth, movement, and color, opal is a truly phenomenal gemstone.

Opal: The Phenomenal Gemstone

Jack Townsend

michael-o-donoghue

Janet & Paul Clifford

Jürgen Schütz

Andrew Cody

Wilson Cooper

Bob Farrar

Catherine Gaber

Barry Neville

Max Weibel

Klaus Eberhard Wild

Elizabeth T. Smith

Alex Ritchie

Günther Neumeier & others

Lithographie, LLC

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