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I'm buying my brother a present—It's the holiday season after all. He's about to start his academic career in chemistry. I would like to give him a book on chemistry, but not something that is considered "chem 101", "popular", or too specialized and probably off-topic. I am a mathematician myself, and in my field we have the beautiful "Princeton companion to mathematics". It is edited by a Field's medallist, has contributions of many high-profile mathematicians, and is both incredibly varied and in-depth. It contains many, many beautiful phenomena, but is by no means a "popular book" or an easy read. I was wondering if anything like this exists in Chemistry. So to clarify: the book would ideally introduce an advanced reader to several concepts in other branches of chemistry than the person's speciality, in a way that is appealing to a serious academic. Many thanks!

Pete L.
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  • Greenwood-Earnshaw could work - it's about inorganic compounds, not concepts, though. BTW this topic is rather too broad :/ – Mithoron Nov 28 '20 at 13:39
  • Thanks! In what sense is it too broad? Perhaps such a thing simply does not exist within the field of chemistry... – Pete L. Nov 28 '20 at 13:46
  • I am definitely not after a university textbook... – Pete L. Nov 28 '20 at 13:46
  • G. E. isn't a textbook, but reference book, so it's OK in this way, but covers only inorganic, not whole of chem. It's still a huge and interesting thing. Dunno about more general book. Such not exactly specific questions with multiple more or less fitting possible answers are considered too broad. – Mithoron Nov 28 '20 at 13:55
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    Not specifically what you're looking for, but consider the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. – Zhe Nov 28 '20 at 14:44
  • Although not the encyclopedic work you asked for as as gifts go, consider a 1st edition [1939] of Linus Pauling's, "The Nature of the Chemical Bond." Truly a classic. – Hal Nov 29 '20 at 00:53

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One of the most comprehensive descriptive chemistry books is Holleman and Wiberg's Inorganic Chemistry. It fits your encyclopedic criterion with about 2000 pages with all major atomic structure concepts plus descriptive chemistry of the elements. It is being published for more than 100 years and originally it was in German.

Another classic, again of about >1000 pages was Glasstone's "A Textbook of Physical Chemistry". It is slightly dated (1940s) but very exhaustive in terms of covering all the classical concepts to be ever encountered in physical chemistry.

AChem
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Or consider the Merck Index, which lists the properties and practical applications of about $10'000$ chemicals by alphabetic order, covering more than $2000$ pages. Afterwards, there is a list of about $500$ different types of chemical reactions, And it is not expensive (about $100$ €) as it has been printed and reprinted so many times since its first edition (1899). It is the Bible for chemists. And it is not commercially related to the chemical factory Merck, apart from the name.

Maurice
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  • Nitpick: It is now (15th edition) licensed by Merck (the Merck known as MSD) to the RSC. Not sure about now (because of RSC's online edition) but in the past, earlier editions were available as a less heavy, easier to (structure)search CD, too (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ci0400462). – Buttonwood Nov 28 '20 at 19:31