When I met with publisher Alice Peters (now a principal of AK Peters), she and I discussed what our fallback plan should be in case the book was actually too small to be economical to publish! We were so innocent, so naive...

My inspiriation for Gems came about one day when I was going over a graphics programming problem with a friend. I knew there was a clever trick that would save him a lot of time, and when I showed it to him he wasn't pleased at all. It was an elegant and useful bit of information, but you could only get it if you happened to re-invent it, or learned it from a friend. I'm all for sharing knowledge personally, but it seemed to me that this was a slow and difficult way to communicate useful information, and was perhaps even impossible for those working alone or in remote regions. I thought it would be useful to write down some of the most useful techniques so we'd have them around for all time. I put out a call for contributions and put on my Editor's hat.

I considered editing the second book, but I felt that I had exercised a lot of personal choice in the first book (as an Editor is supposed to do, of course). I thought that if I could find a talented colleague with the time and interest to edit the second book, it would help stir up the "gene pool" of ideas. I wanted the second book to have its own personality. I was thrilled when my friend and colleague Jim Arvo agreed to take on editing duties for the second book.

Settling on a name for this second book was harder than I thought. Many people wanted to use "More Graphics Gems", but I thought that if there were more volumes to come (as indeed there were), we would end up with titles like "Still Yet Even More Bride of the Son of Graphics Gems Returns." Happily, "Graphics Gems II" won out, and the pattern was established.

Well, the ball was rolling by that point. I found myself the Series Editor for the Graphics Gems Series, a project that seemed to take on a life of its own. My most important job was selecting and helping the editor of each volume; I also drew the chapter-opening graphics and wrote a preface. I am very pleased and proud that the next three books were edited by David Kirk, Paul Heckbert, and Alan Paeth.

One reason that the Gems series was popular was because it was populist: the profits went back to the contributors. Often in a large volume with dozens of contributors, each person is paid a flat fee upon acceptance of the piece, and then the royalties from the books go to the editors and publishers. I felt that the Gems books were by the community, and for the community. I set up a royalty scheme where the profits were considered to be a big "pie", and each contributor got one "slice" per contribution. There was a little play in the system - some small entries got clustered together, and the editor got a few extra slices for his service. People felt good about contributing to Graphics Gems because the money was coming back into their pockets. Royalty checks continue to be mailed out even today.

Another nice part of the Gems package was that I thought we should illustrate as many of the contributions as possible with real, working source code. And I wanted that source code to be free. Each book contains public-domain listings, and some of the later books include disks. You can download all of the Gems code, including bug fixes, from www.graphicsgems.org, a web site managed by Eric Haines.

Once we'd reached the fifth book in the series I felt that we had done our job. The flood of pent-up tricks had reduced to a drizzle, which told me that we had emptied people's drawers and notebooks. That seemed like a good time to wrap up the series. I have declined to approve any new volumes, and I believe that this wonderful ride has acheived its goal.

The Gems books are available at Amazon. You can click on any cover above, or follow these links to Gems I, Gems II, Gems III, Gems IV, and Gems V.

After some time I felt that there should be a place for new, small tips and techniques like those in the Gems series, even though I knew that more books wasn't the answer. A journal, however, seemed just the right vehicle. I was delighted to found The Journal of Graphics Tools, published by AK Peters. Ronen Barzel has been our unflappable and generous Editor-in-Chief since the beginning. If you have new little ideas, check out the jgt home page and consider sending them in.

To see the complete Table of Contents for each Gems volume, and download the source code, hop on over to graphicsgems.org.

By the way, please be aware that there are other books that have the word "Gems" in the title. Although some of these are quite good, some are not. None of them are associated with the Graphics Gems series, nor have I been involved in their production.