The exploration of the elements continues! Theodore Gray's Elements Vault builds on Gray's best-selling book with all new text, plus removable historic letters and other artifacts and collectible samples of real elements The Elements Vault picks up where The Elements left off. Organized into the nine major groups of the periodic table, including the alkali metals, the alkali earth metals, the transition metals, the nonmetals, the metalloids, the halogens, the noble gases, the actinides, and the lanthanides, Elements Vault includes all new text, new photographs, and even more information about the elements. Elements Vault also includes 20 removable historic documents related to the elements and the field of chemistry, such as Einstein's famous letter to Roosevelt explaining the potential of uranium for use in nuclear weapons, a genuine advertisement for lithium-laced 7UP soda, Mendeleev's original notes on the periodic table, and more. Each of these documents is individually packaged in an envelope attached to the book page. The document can be removed and handled and then put back into the book for safekeeping. Also here is a gorgeous 20" x 10" poster of the unique rainbow spectrum emitted by each element in the periodic table. Also included inside the book are real samples of pure elements! Filled with Theo Gray's and Nick Mann's trademark stunning photography throughout, Elements Vault is the perfect addition to Gray's growing series of all-things-elements.

The ultimate Theodore Gray collection, Theodore Gray's Completely Mad Science collects every one of Gray's dramatic, visually spectacular, and enlightening scientific experiments into one complete volume. Bestselling author Theodore Gray has spent more than a decade dreaming up, executing, photographing, and writing about extreme scientific experiments, which he then published between 2009 and 2014 in his monthly Popular Science column "Gray Matter." Previously published in book form by Black Dog in two separate volumes (Mad Science and Mad Science 2), these experiments, plus an additional 5, are available now in one complete book.Completely Mad Science is 432 pages of dazzling chemical demonstrations, illustrated in spectacular full-color photographs. Experiments include: Casting a model fish out of mercury (demonstrating how this element behaves very differently depending upon temperature); the famous Flaming Bacon Lance that can cut through steel (demonstrating the amount of energy contained in fatty foods like bacon); creating nylon thread out of pure liquid by combining molecules of hexamethylenediamine and sebacoyl chloride; making homemade ice cream using a fire extinguisher and a pillow case; powering your iPhone using 150 pennies and an apple, and many, many more. Theodore Gray is the author of The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe; Molecules: The Elements and the Architecture of Everything; Theo Gray's Mad Science: Experiments You Can Do at Home, But Probably Shouldn't; and Mad Science 2: Experiments You Can Do at Home, but Still Probably Shouldn't. He lives in Urbana, Illinois.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

One of the most well-known and influential autobiographies ever written, The Education of Henry Adams is told in the third person, as if its author were watching his own life unwind. It begins with his early life in Quincy, the family seat outside of Boston, and soon moves on to primary school, Harvard College, and beyond. He learns about the unpredictability of politics from statesmen and diplomats, and the newest discoveries in technology, science, history, and art from some of the most important thinkers and creators of the day. In essentially every case, Adams claims, his education and upbringing let him down, leaving him in the dark. But as the historian David S. Brown puts it, this is a “charade”: The Education’s “greatest irony is its claim to telling the story of its author’s ignorance, confusion, and misdirection.” Instead, Adams uses its “vigorous prose and confident assertions” to attack “the West after 1400.” For instance, industrialization and technology make Adams wonder “whether the American people knew where they were driving.” And in one famous chapter, “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he contrasts the rise of electricity and the power it brings with the strength and resilience of religious belief in the Middle Ages. The grandson and great-grandson of two presidents and the son of a politician and diplomat who served under Lincoln as minister to Great Britain, Adams was born into immense privilege, as he knew well: “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he.” After growing up a Boston Brahmin, he worked as a journalist, historian, and professor, moving in early middle age to Washington. Although Adams distributed a privately printed edition of a hundred copies of The Education for friends and family in 1907, it wasn’t published more widely until 1918, the year he died. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1919, and in 1999 a Modern Library panel placed it first on its list of the best nonfiction books published in the twentieth century. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Bridging the fields of conservation, art history, and museum curating, this volume contains the principal papers from an international symposium titled "Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice" at the University of Leiden in Amsterdam, Netherlands, from June 26 to 29, 1995. The symposium—designed for art historians, conservators, conservation scientists, and museum curators worldwide—was organized by the Department of Art History at the University of Leiden and the Art History Department of the Central Research Laboratory for Objects of Art and Science in Amsterdam. Twenty-five contributors representing museums and conservation institutions throughout the world provide recent research on historical painting techniques, including wall painting and polychrome sculpture. Topics cover the latest art historical research and scientific analyses of original techniques and materials, as well as historical sources, such as medieval treatises and descriptions of painting techniques in historical literature. Chapters include the painting methods of Rembrandt and Vermeer, Dutch 17th-century landscape painting, wall paintings in English churches, Chinese paintings on paper and canvas, and Tibetan thangkas. Color plates and black-and-white photographs illustrate works from the Middle Ages to the 20th century.