A monthly register of the most important works published in North and South America, in India, China, and the British colonies: with occasional notes on German, Dutch, Danish, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian books.

Working with the premise that there are much meaning and value in the "repelling beauty" of mining landscapes, Richard Francaviglia identifies the visual clues that indicate an area has been mined and tells us how to read them, showing the interconnections among all of America's major mining districts. With a style as bold as the landscape he reads and with photographs to match, he interprets the major forces that have shaped the architecture, design, and topography of mining areas. Covering many different types of mining and mining locations, he concludes that mining landscapes have come to symbolize the turmoil between what our society elects to view as two opposing forces: culture and nature.

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.

Billed in early issues as "a practical journal of industrial progress", this monthly covers a broad range of topics in engineering, manufacturing, mechanics, architecture, building, etc. Later issues say it is "devoted to the advancement and diffusion of practical knowledge."