This volume – the first ever complete translation into English – includes over 1400 illustrations: photographs, sketches for jewels and prints from fashion magazines. 136 colour photographs of jewels now in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs are new to this edition.

All the great and now more obscure jewelers are included in the text and illustrations: Alphonse Fouquet, Boucheron, Falize, Froment-Maurice, Cartier, Chaumet, Georges Fouquet, Gaillard, Vever, Lalique, and many many more.

The discussion in the text is not only of the individual jewels and types of jewelry, but also includes many entertaining anecdotes about the jewelers' relations with their customers and with society in general. Being himself a jeweler, Henri Vever was able to talk personally with all the people he writes about (or their followers), so the book has an unusual degree of authority.