PYLYAEV MIKHAIL (1842-1899) Dragotsennye kamni, ikh svoystva, mestonakhozhdenie i upotreblenie. [Precious Stones, their Properties, Locations, and Use.] 2nd ed., significantly revised. St. Petersburg: publ. A.S. Suvorin, 1888.

- [4], 386, V p.: ill., 2 leaves col. ill.; 25 cm. In a period full leather binding with artistic gold embossing. With publisher's chromolithographed cover. Wear on the binding, cracks in the block, minor soiling. Paper ex-libris of N.K. Sinyagin on the endpaper. A valuable reference manual on the history of stones, an early and little-known work by the famous chronicler of the antiquities of the two capitals, Mikhail Ivanovich Pylyaev (1842-1899). It contains descriptions of all known types of precious, semi-precious, and ornamental stones of that time, methods of processing, cutting, and imitation, histories of discoveries and development, and famous deposits such as Golconda, Kimberley, Diamantina, etc. Provenance: Nikolay Kuzmich Sinyagin (1874-1912) — a wealthy St. Petersburg merchant, bibliophile, collector, and bibliographer. His library consisted of about 20,000 volumes. In 1917, when the Sinyagin house was handed over to a military unit, his brother, Ivan Kuzmich, sold the library to P.V. Gubar for a very low price. Gubar later sold rarities from it in his antique shop "Antikvariat" on Nevsky Prospekt.