Fred's Book Club: I Wanna Rock!

Welcome back to another episode of the Humpback Writers, the book feature that explores anything between two covers that I own in my library. No humps have actually been observed, even in cases where our books have dealt with biology or other sciences. If you are an author and we write about your book and you do have a hump, please inform us or the proper medical authorities. 

Today we're back on the science beat with a book that I don't know why I still own or why I thought of it today. It was purchased for a college course that I recall with some fondness. However, as this class was well outside my field of concentration, please bear in mind that any statements I make about geology below may not be accurate.

"Of all the objects in nature, minerals are among the most readily available for study and, because of their immense variety and intrinsic beauty, have always been items of interest and curiosity." -- from the foreword

Rocks and Minerals: A Guide to Field Identification, by Charles Sorrell with illustrations by George Sandström, was first published in 1973 by Western Publishing, the company best remembered for the Little Golden Books that every American encounters in childhood. Simon & Schuster now owns the Little Golden series, following Western's demise, but St. Martin's owns the Golden Guides, including this one, which is still in print. My edition was not the first -- I did not go to college in 1973, thank you -- but I don't think the book has changed much in close to 50 years. It is what it says, a paperback guide to take into the field to identify rocks and minerals you may encounter. Here's a typical spread:

Our class required this book, and another textbook that I sold back to the bookstore for a pittance. This one I kept, probably because it was only $7.95 and they'd give me zilch for it, but also out of curiosity. I liked walking about the woods, and I suppose I thought I might go marching into the brush one day seeking out interesting rocks and minerals. That has never happened, or at least not yet. If it does, this book will be good to have.

This is the kind of book one acquires when one is a senior and nearing graduation and is informed that one is three credits shy of the math and science requirement and will not graduate on time without great effort. Of course, when I say "one" I mean "I." I had thought that my Computer Science studies counted as science, but as far as the degree program believed, they counted as electives. I could have taken nine credits of something I liked instead of nine credits of Computer Science, damn it!

Well, that's all COBOL under the bridge. I had to do an emergency class, and was informed that the school was offering some one-month intensive classes, three hours a day, through which I could fulfill my requirement and graduate in June. Rocks, Minerals, and Gems -- or as I came to call it, Rocks for Jocks -- would satisfy the dean. I think the other students were in the same jam as me. None of them were science majors.

One of the things I remember best from our genial professor is his unit on molecular structure and the formation of rocks and especially crystals. It seemed to me like crystals looked the way they looked right down to the molecules, as seen on the illustrations above. If humans were like that, I guess we'd look mostly like H2O molecules, or so I fancied. 

I did not choose the above spread at random, however. You will note the descriptions of zincite, and especially zincite with franklinite. Franklinite is an oxide mineral rarely found on its own, and is usually embedded in something else. It was discovered at a mine in Franklin, New Jersey, and is sought, or was, mainly for the zinc and manganese it accompanies. The reason I bring this up is that toward the end of the month-long class, the professor put us on a bus to go across the river to Franklin to see the Franklin Mineral Museum, which exists to this day (although current closed for Chinese Death Viral reasons). It would be the last school field trip I would ever take.

As it turned out, we didn't all fit on the bus, so two guys from Jersey who'd driven to college said I could ride with them. This turned out to be an interesting ride, as they had a cooler of beer with them, which we enjoyed on the hour-plus drive to Franklin. However, it did make the museum tour more boring than it should have been, because all I wanted to go was go back to the beer and swap more stories with my newfound friends. But we saw a lot of rocks, a mine reconstruction, a film about the mining industry in New Jersey, and it was just fine. In the end, since the Jersey boys weren't going back to the city after the trip, I had to ride the bus back to town, sobering up as half the class napped.

I have one other souvenir from that class besides the book -- somewhere, I know not where, I have a small white rock I found at the museum, studded with little black crystals of Franklinite. And with that, my undergraduate science education came to a close.