Griffin, John Joseph; A System of Crystallography with its Application to Mineralogy. Glasgow, Richard Griffin and Company and Thomas Tegg, London, 1841. Quarto, pp. xxvii, 346, numerous text figures. Part 2, pp. 143, numerous text figures.
The work is complete and in a later cloth with gilt titles. The binding is tight and clean, text is very clean. From the library of the noted chemist Franz Sondheimer (1926-1981) with his book plate on paste down and biography with his photo on rear pastedown. In very good condition.
An English bookseller, chemist, crystallographer and publisher, Griffin (1802-1877) was born in 1802 in Shoreditch.. The family moved to Glasgow when he was young, and he studied at the Anderson Institution and received further education in chemistry in Paris and Heidelberg.
Griffin commenced business in Glasgow as a bookseller, publisher, and dealer in chemical apparatus and crystal models. In 1852 the bookseller - publisher partnership with his brother was dissolved and he established what was to be a firm of chemical apparatus dealers (J. J. Griffin & Sons).Through a series of mergers the company was later to develop into the major apparatus supplier Griffin & George.
Griffin devised many new forms of chemical apparatus, including the common style of beaker which sometimes bears his name,[and did much in introducing scientific methods into commercial processes.
He remained devoted in his attempts to popularise the study of chemistry and crystallography and in 1823 published "Chemical Recreations: a popular manual of experimental chemistry", which was highly successful and went through several editions and in 1841 his System of Crystallography. He published other works but these were his most popular. The OCLC lists six copies of his "System of Crystallography" in institutions worldwide.
The first part of his book is devoted to the principles of crystallography and part two is devoted to the application of crystallography to mineralogy.
