AMAZING TREASURES

A trove of wonders natural and otherwise, from fabled caches to jaw-dropping sites and sights.

Long defines treasure broadly enough to include not only assorted glittering gems and golden hoards, but the Great Barrier Reef, moon rocks, and the lost library of Alexandria. His descriptive notes, which run from terse paragraphs for Russia’s Amber Room and China’s old, huge Da Ming Hun Yi Tu map to two pages for the Maya ruins of Tikal, are loosely grouped under rubrics such as “Sunken Treasures” and “Fossils.” They come with reasonably realistic painted pictures that likewise range in scale from images of a tiny copy of the Mona Lisa painted with an eyelash and a White mine owner holding a grapefruit-sized diamond to aerial views of Masada, Windsor Castle, and the Forbidden City. (There is also a world map on the center spread that serves as a supplemental index.) The pictures don’t pop the way the color-saturated photos in Rose Davidson’s Big Book of Bling (2019) and other like treasuries do, but what this lacks in visual dazzle it makes up for in scope—so that even dedicated armchair treasure seekers are likely to find new marvels to moon over.

There’s gold in them thar pages…not to mention rocks, ice, bling, and timeless yarns.