Do you know that diamonds are “lipophilic”—that’s, they’re interested in fats and grease? That “jade” is a reputation that applies to 2 (fully completely different) kinds of stone? That sapphires should not essentially blue; certainly, they run from “peachy orange” to “close to black”—and that crimson sapphires are identified to us by one other title, “rubies”?

In her fantastically produced guide Lapidarium, artwork critic Hettie Judah presents a cornucopia of tales about stone, lots of them unusual and shocking. Made up of a collection of 60 temporary essays—every targeted on a special rock, from basalt to obsidian, tuff to turquoise—this can be a guide to be dipped into each time the temper takes you, harking back to Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Color.

“Nice gems are valued for gossipy, scandalous historical past in addition to their magnificence,” Judah tells us, providing up tales of cursed jewels, infamous fakes and “petromaniacs” who’ve bankrupted themselves over their thirst for valuable stones. However Judah does properly to seize too the fantastic thing about her glistering subject material: pink ancaster, as sculpted by Barbara Hepworth, is “a dilute membranous pink,” she writes, “the color of connective tissue”; garnets “have the juicy lustre of pomegranate seeds”; whereas bloodstone is “like a darkish mound of wilted spinach flecked with crimson chilli”.

Judah’s playful method stretches the bounds of what one would possibly consider as “stone”. We take minor detours through calculi (bodily deposits like bladder and kidney stones), coprolite (“petrified poo”) and Coade stone (a kind of white terracotta, fashionable amongst Georgian architects). However these brief, readable entries supply the overall reader snapshots from the historical past of crystallography; an introduction to “deep time”; and an explainer for the way the worldwide commerce in uncommon minerals destabilises creating international locations. It’s a charming guide, full of peculiar perception.