You may remember the Periodic Table from school—an array of colored tabs representing the chemical elements, and about as exciting to look at as a collection of dry cleaning tickets. A few years ago, popular science writer and columnist Theodore Gray turned to his remarkable personal collection of elemental samples and produced a new and rather spectacular table using photos of those samples. Each two-page spread in this fascinating book pictures an element in its physical form, if possible—oxygen, for example, is chilled to the point that it becomes a beautiful blue liquid—along with its atomic weight, density, radius, and other vital statistics. In his wry conversational style, Gray also describes the element's key properties and uses.