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The history of a book.
It all began in early 2006 with the purchase of some Australian Black Jade on E-Bay. I had started cabochon cutting again after several years of sporadic faceting. I saw some nice intarsia work done using a faceting machine and displayed at a local rock and gem show. The decision was made to teach myself intarsia and do some of my own work. Black Jade for framing was quickly located on E-Bay and a few pounds were purchased. I decided to make a few simple Black Jade frames with Jasper cut-outs in the center.

About mid-year and 100+ cabochons later I had developed my own style of producing freeform intarsia and no longer desired to use the faceting machine for more precise cuts. By October I had finished about 250 pieces of the freeform intarsia and had run out of the Black Jade. I tried the materials from Wyoming, California, and Arizona, but only the material from Australia took a quick and easy polish. (The Arizona material was a close second, but it was just about as hard to find at the Australian.) My E-Bay sources had dried up.

Eventually I found a supplier of the Black Jade in Australia, Glenn Archer of Outback Mining had tons of it, but the shipping from Australia was a bit prohibitive. I contacted Glenn via e-mail and he mentioned that he came to Quartzsite and Tucson each year. I decided that I would go to Quartzsite in January of 2007. I hadn't been there in over 30 years, but I remembered it being a small group of tailgaters that met once a year in the desert to trade rocks. (Amazing how things change in 30+ years.)

I wanted to have some photos of my work and some photos of the Agates and Jaspers that I used in its production to take along. So I fired up my trusty Macintosh, and pulled up iPhoto and began to make some test images. I remembered that iPhoto had some templates to auto-publish a book, and decided that would be a nice way to do it. Before long I decided the templates were not sufficient for putting my images together in the style I wanted to use. I was trying to figure out how to design my own template, when I learned at a local computer club meeting that Apple's Aperture software (a step up from iPhoto) had a way to design custom templates for making iPhoto style books. I purchased a copy and I was off. Over the next two months I photographed slabs, and cabs, and put together a small book of images.
The largest book (at that time) from Apple was 8.5" x 11" and became more expensive as the page count increased. My original intention was to create a photobook with little text information. To the left are images of the cover and few internal page spreads.

I divided up the agates into some of the usual categories and ended up describing each one in about 2 or 3 paragraphs. I included a few pictures of my cabs in some sections, and only slabs in others. I identified the material in the photos with small descriptions near the border of each image.

The layout was kind of random on each individual page, but I maintained agates in the first half of the book and jaspers in the second. I tried grouping the images in different patterns placing only one material on most pages, but eventually ended up combining materials to cut down on the page count as the book grew in length.

Although the creation of a colored book using this type of publishing is not prohibitive for books up to about 20 to 30 pages, it can get kind of expensive as the page numbers continue to grow. Rule of thumb (at that time) was about a dollar a page plus the cost of the cover. (A page being defined as one printed side of paper.)

I saved the last four pages for some images of my favorite cabochons (and freeform intarisa). This first attempt ended up with 60 pages and about 240 photos. It ended up costing me about $80. I got the final copy back from Apple in a week and had it around Christmas.

I headed off to the tailgaters show in Quartzsite in early January, 2007 and decided to drive out so I could bring back more rough. It's a 2250 mile one way drive from North Carolina. I stayed in Blythe, California, about 20 miles from Quartzsite as I discovered there are only about 16 total motel rooms in Quartzsite and they are booked years in advance.

I was shocked; the Quartzsite show was a lot larger than I remembered from back in the 1970's when I first attended. There were hundreds of rock dealers from all over the world. I looked up Glenn Archer and purchased about 250 lb of rough Australian Black Jade. I showed him my work (some actual display samples I had taken with me) and the little 60 page book.

He asked me if I was going to publish it. "Well actually no", I replied, I had just brought it along to help identify the materials I was looking to purchase. I had found that many jaspers seemed to have more than one name. A photo as they say is often worth a 1000 words.

I ended up spending the week at Quartzsite and met many of the dealers I had purchased from on E-Bay and many indicated there was a need for a book with pictures and descriptions of jasper as there currently was nothing in the market. I ended up bringing back about 600 lb of rough and slabs from my first trip back to Quartzsite, and the idea of actually publishing a book.