Chapman & Hall, 193, Piccadilly, London, 1853. . Book Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. First Edition. ppxx,326,x, from the library of the Office Of  Woods[now the forestry commission] with 3 stamps.Recently rebound in green cloth, with blind stamped edging. Includes a general outline of the gold regoins of the world with a treatise on the geology of gold. supremely rare ‘The Gold Rocks of Great Britain & Ireland’, by the renowned Victorian philanderer & charlatan John Calvert.. Calvert has managed to tarnish his well deserved reputation as a gold prospector by living down to Mark Twain’s definition of a gold mine/ miner as ‘A hole in the ground with a liar up top’. This having been said Calvert’s Book is salted throughout with real nuggets of pure gold for anyone interested in gold and all aspects of its discovery & recovery. Calvert’s fundamental argument is that there is naturally occurring gold to be found just about everywhere, and he argues his case so compellingly with historical, scientific and factual evidence that anyone short of a few bob would be foolish not to invest in a gold pan and get panning in the stream at the bottom of their dos house garden! Similarly, anyone who has never understood the grip of gold fever would be unimaginative to be untouched by the virus after reading this fascinating account of treasure trove, ‘troven’ and yet to be ‘troved’.
The author goes into anecdotal & factual accounts of the history of the Californian Gold Rush, The Australian Gold Rush, The South African Gold Rush and every gold rush before back to Jason and the Argonauts and the quest for the Golden Fleece. This is all besides the subject of the title, which is of course covered in great detail. John Calvert John Frederick Calvert (1825-1897) was a notorious rogue of Victorian England, particularly well known as a gold prospector and collector. He had strong associations with Australia where he lived for several years and amassed huge collections of minerals, shells, fossils, books, antiquities and ethnographia. He claimed to have been the great grandson of the last Lord Baltimore, but as the name Calvert is the only link to the Baltimore’s this is highly unlikely. Calvert’s father Edward Crouch changed his name to Calvert in the early 19th Century, which eradicates the only conceivable link to the Baltimore’s. Further to this Calvert claimed to have been born in 1811 or 1814, but was actually born on the 9th March 1825.
 
John Calvert`s birth circumstances and parentage were the subject of a controversy which ran for four months in 1891, and occupied many pages of the prestigious mining paper the `London Mining Journal`. His actual birth date renders his claims of discovering gold in Australia in the 1930’s extremely suspect, considering he would have been a teenager. Besides these rather extreme misrepresentations by Calve.