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Deer, W.A., Howie, R.A. and Zussman, J. Rock-forming Minerals. Volume 4A. Second Edition. Framework silicates: Feldspars.

London (The Geological Society). 2001, x + 972 pp. £115 (£50 to members). ISBN 1-86239-081-9l. Hardback.

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

For mineralogists, petrologists and geochemists everywhere, the appearance of a new volume in Deer, Howie and Zussman’s Rock-forming Minerals series is an outstanding publishing event. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this volume is that the first edition came out in 1963 (when this reviewer was an eager PhD student) and nearly 40 years later (now a tribal silverback fast approaching retirement) the same stalwart team is producing the same admirable, encyclopaedic, invaluable books. To borrow a catch-phrase from a car advertisement, if only everything in life was as reliable as DHZ!

The 1963 edition dealt with all types of framework silicates, devoting 178 pages to the feldspars, with 60 figures and about 600 references. The new edition covers feldspars only and runs to 972 pages. There are 590 figures and roughly 4000 references, up to date to early 2000. It is fascinating to compare the two editions, not only because of the enormous increase in knowledge that this expansion represents, but also because of the diversity of areas in Earth Science into which the book leads us. Methods in mineral physics and isotope geochemistry which were unknown or rudimentary in 1963 are now commonplace. Whereas in 1963 we were told, in a few lines devoted to age determination using potassium feldspar, only that "The ⁴⁰K/⁴⁰Ar ratio is now accepted as a useful additional method of age determination.....", we now have 14 pages on the ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar method. Perhaps the most striking growth is in the section on ‘Experimental work’, which got only nine pages in 1963, as a sub-section of ‘Chemistry’, but now extends to 209 pages. Electron microscopy plays a much stronger role in modern mineralogy and the reproduction of half-tone micrographs is, with a few exceptions, very good. There are many places where the importance of . . . [Full Text of this Article]