"Encyclopedic" / semi-exhaustive reference work on Chemistry 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 &quot;chem 101&quot;, &quot;popular&quot;, or too specialized and probably off-topic. I am a mathematician myself, and in my field we have the beautiful &quot;Princeton companion to mathematics&quot;. 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 &quot;popular book&quot; 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!
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 &gt;1000 pages was Glasstone's &quot;A Textbook of Physical Chemistry&quot;. It is slightly dated (1940s) but very exhaustive in terms of covering all the classical concepts to be ever encountered in physical chemistry.