Lapidarium weaves the surprising stories of the 60 most fascinating stones into a rich cultural history: from the red ground hematite pigment our cave-painting ancestors used and the mystery behind the tuff Easter Island heads, to the columbite that caused the Playstation War and the intriguing history of the cairngorm crystal ball, to the scandalous story of Flint Jack, whose forgeries still populate many museums in the UK today.

I felt like I was reading a set of blog posts--not systematic, but an agreeable and informative experience overall. Here's the thing: I wanted to be able to come away from each chapter able to say a couple of sentences about each stone, but this book will leave you with a half–remembered sentence on someone who owned the stone in a century you probably won't remember.

Unearth the mystery of the tuff statues of Rapa Nui, the lost amber room of Frederick of Prussia and the scandal of Flint Jack.

A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes. Hettie Judah breaks her book down by types of stones into these categories;Stones and Powers, Sacred Stones, Stones and Stories, Stone Technology, Shapes in Stones and Living Stones. Lapidarium is a wonderfully informative history of sixty of the most fascinating stones, their many stories and the people and places linked with them. She breaks down the history of each individual stone and how it’s impacted the human race through history. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

I found myself locked out of the house with nothing to amuse myself with, no phone to play with, and a three hour wait for the next person with keys to show up. Aside from all of that I’m delighted I was locked out because it’s an incredibly interesting book and one I was genuinely sad to finish a couple of days later.

As a broadcaster she can been heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. Through the realms of art, myth, geology, philosophy and power, the story of humanity can be told through the minerals and materials that have allowed us to evolve and create. I wanted to love it – I think there should be loads of books encouraging us to reconnect with the natural world, to come away with some general knowledge about our planet and our surroundings and how it's shaped human civilisation at large. Might be a good reference for those seeking this type of information, and I discovered it was not me. Not yet ready to leave this post-book mental space now lit crystalline and glittering with the fruits of the earth thanks to Hettie’s heady prose, I thought I might ask the author and art historian a few questions–which she kindly answered for me in this blog post https://unquietthings.

Judah's pages are filled with eccentrics and inventors, with the obsessive pursuit of beauty, the hopeful constructions of belief and the thirst for progress and improvement. I truly lost myself reading this book and discovering how important stones are to us all even in our modern age.

She weaves stone through human history showing us how we gave different types of stone the power of royalty and worship. Beautifully illustrated with color-coding near the binding of each section of the author's selection of stones.In jewelry my preference has always been for the semiprecious stones that had some character and color to them.