For FREE to ALL, over a 1,000,000
dollars value, a huge PDF library: “Gill's Library of Gems, Minerals & Geology”,
size 12 GBs total, for you, your friends & your colleagues.
In early June 2009 my wife Nancy and I were in northern Madagascar at the new demantoid mining fields and our guide was my good friend Marc Jobin, FGA. Marc is a world class gem trader with over 35 years experience and a first class gemologist. I happily gave Marc a new copy of my large, recently completely reorganized, e-book library that I have been working on for several years, mostly all PDF’s. I have asked him to please distribute this very fine Gem & Mineral library for me while he regularly travels the world and attends the Tucson show and other shows. Marc will connect his external hard drives to the laptop of ANY interested person and give a copy of this entire collection in less than an hour. The current value for all the books in this e-texts library, if in hard texts, would be over one million US dollars and several years of intense collecting would be needed. Books are very heavy and hard to use while this e-text library is a simple file on your laptop that is fully searchable for anything and you can FREELY share a copy with all your friends and clients, etc.
Earl Hoffman,someone who is dedicated to learning and getting the information passed around has offered to help with distribution. Please email Earl at hoffmans@ix.netcom.com to arrange sending a 13 GB flash drive to get your own FREE copy of the library. Please, I encourage each person who gets this library to keep it, as is, and pass it on to all they know with that same message. This is all I ask in return for my years of hard work.
It would be very helpful if any jewelry, gemology, geology or mineralogy journals would give a notice in there next available issue, of this, free offer to ALL. If, as is my hope, all the magazines, i.e., Lapidary journal, Rocks & Minerals, the Mineralogical Record, National Jeweler, JCK, Modern Jeweler, G & G, Journal of Gemmology, Australian Gemmologist, American Minerologist, U.S. Geological Survey’s annual reports, etc. give notice of this incredible free offering, my true goal may be reached. Certainly all the editors & writers for these publications will want a copy on their own laptop for quick reference to anything. My goal is to get this library on over 100,000 laptops. With each recipient of this library passing a copy on to others this goal could easily be reached in one year and the collection could never be lost.
(NOTE: I am the accumulator, collector, and organizer of this vast library, but the copyright of most the texts files offered are held by Microsoft Corp. & Google who only allow FREE distribution of these texts, NOT EVER to be sold…….in any form what so ever.)
This FREE library currently contains well over 200 books on gemstones, size 5 GBs, including most all the classics, 1652 onward until 2009, including all books and many papers by George Frederick Kunz 1856-1932, Edwin William Streeter, Charles William King 1818-1888, Wallis Richard Cattelle 1848-1912, Berthold Laufer 1874-1934, Robert Boyle 1627-1691, John Mawe 1764 – 1829, plus many more texts. There is also all the “Gems & Gemology 1934 – 1980” in a single totally searchable PDF file, 46 years of gemological knowledge at your fingertips, along with each separate G & G issue. I also include the U.S. Geological Survey’s annual reports on World Gem Production for 1882 – 2006. I hope to have donated soon other similar journals included such as “The Gemmologist 1931 – 1962”.
The mineral book collection is 3.90 GBs, with over 160 books, 1556 onward until 2009, including ALL the original works of James Sowerby 1757-1822 and his family, De Re Metallica - by Georgii Agricolae (Georgius Agricola), the 1st Latin edition of 1556 and Georgius Agricola's, De Re Metallica - Translated by U.S.A. President Herbert Hoover 1912, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz 1807 – 1873, Curtis P. Schuh 1959-2007, plus many more texts. I am interested in using this core collection as a starter for a much larger collection available to all. If you are a serious collector and a possible contributor to this project we hope that you will do so. After viewing their ease of use, you will hopefully want to add many of the books in your own personal collection to this library.
Before I sold my collection at Christies, NYC, in 1987, “Christie's Sale of Gill Gem Books 1987-88” (see the copy of this unique sale catalog in the Gems & Jewels Library), I went down to Silicon Valley in California to see if I could get my collection digitized but the technologies were not there yet. You will see from my eBook collection that all books will be available in a few years to come, but your cooperation will speed up this process. I know from my own business experience that by making these works available it will enhance the value of your own original editions, while making these unique publications available to all. I am requesting PDF files that are exact copies front cover to back cover, scanned at 400 dpi or above so they can be easily OCR’d, (made from pictures into text readable and searchable documents). Please send your e-texts directly to Joseph O. Gill, email gilljoseph1949@yahoo.com. We hope that you will also put a copy of this library, downloadable to all, on your own web site. People will be able to read these books offline as they wish, without being online for hours at a time, as is necessary with the smaller gem book collection at www.Farlang.com. Here in all of Madagascar there is no way to download anything on the poor internet connections.
I recently copied a 250 page book with my simple digital camera and made it into a fully searchable PDF document in a few minutes with the all new Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional (also called CS4). This incredible program single handedly changes your entire view of e-texts and the ease of putting it online is nothing short of revolutionary. Documents of any size retain their original look and there is NO proofreading necessary, while becoming fully searchable. There is now no need for any index as you can search for any word, phrase, number, date, name etc. and all will be found instantly with no back and forth to any index. Any size, large or small document, can be easily worked with in Acrobat 9 reader or Adobe Acrobat 9 Professional with no bogging down at all. With the all new Acrobat 9 you can copy any text or pictures in this document just as you would in any WORD document for copy and paste.
I can directly read any of these PDF or WORD e-texts files by using my excellent text-to-speech program “NaturalReader 7”, and have the article or 1000 page book read to me in either a excellent male or female voice. With NaturalReader 7 more than ninety-five percent of the texts in this library can be very easily converted into a MP3 file, and have it read to you while driving your car, so audio books are unnecessary. In a year or so you might, as I do now, have some of the rarest books in your library read to you by a TOTALLY human voice while you lay back with a good cup of coffee.
I did approach the GIA on this project, but not surprisingly, they were not interested. Maybe with request from enough interested people they may want to get involved?
I hope that you will want to be involved with this very positive project for the betterment of both gemology and mineralogy. This author is doing this ongoing project in the hope that young budding gemologists will be inspired to know that they can, with enough determination, make a major difference in our young science.
I am also in the process of contacting my old business acquaintances at many of the most famous retail & wholesale jewelers worldwide to request PDF’s of their unique memorabilia, i.e. sketchbooks of jewelry designs, etc., etc., for this online library.
My only regret is that my old friends Richard T. Liddicoat, Robert M. Shipley, Robert Crowningshield, Dr. Fred Pough, Robert Webster, Basil William Anderson, Dr. Edward Gubelin and John Sinkankas are not with us to see this project get under way.
PLEASE, forward this request to any new or old collectors, gemologist, jewelers, etc. that you know.
Best Regards to you all, and, I look forward to hearing any ideas or comments that you may have on this project.
Joseph O. Gill, BSC, GG, FGA
Author & Past Director of Jewelry for Sotheby’s Auction House, North America
EMAIL gilljoseph1949@yahoo.com
WEBSITE www.Worldglobetrotters.com
