Inside the front cover, Robert Hutchinson writes:

It began innocently enough. While photographing the Painted Desert, Atkinson became intrigued with the brilliant colors in the petrified wood scattered on the ground. He brought home some polished rocks, photographed them under glare-free lighting, and was captivated. The photographs looked more like paintings of forgotten dreams than either rocks or photographs. Atkinson proceeded to photograph thousands of art-quality polished rocks, bought or borrowed from international dealers and collectors, and to refine his photographic techniques.

From these thousands of photographs, Atkinson has chosen for ?Within the Stone÷ seventy-two that have yielded the most striking, the most poetic, and the most ineffable images. Atkinson opens a vault beneath our feet, revealing to our astonished eyes the tumult of color, form, and desire hidden ?Within the Stone.÷ He invites us to enter the dreams of Gaia. Some of these are epiphanies so far removed from our mundane experience as to beggar ordinary language and analogy.

Seventy literary pieces were commissioned for this book from seven writers. Every one of the writers has conspicuous attainments in both scientific and artistic modes. Each writer was asked to free-associate with his or her ten assigned photographs as though they were high-level Rorschach patterns. The seven contributors are Diane Ackerman (poet and psychologist), Philip Ball ( Nature editor and dramatist), John Horgan (science writer and philosopher), Andrew Revkin ( New York Times reporter and Hollywood screenplay writer), Dorion Sagan (science writer and novelist), Tyler Volk (NASA biologist and architect), and David Zindell (science fiction novelist and mathematician).

In an appendix, mineralogy experts Si & Ann Frazier and Robert Hutchinson provide mineral commentary for each specimen.