Conversations with Magic Stones was produced to accompany an exhibition in Orkney in 2017. Taking in Stromness Museum, The Orkney Museum and Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, the exhibition mapped the places that prehistoric and ethnographic stone tools have occupied in Orcadian and wider imaginations. Focussed on the biographies of individual artefacts, the volume explores the social history of collecting, the interest in stone tools shown by artists such as Barbara Hepworth, and the values that people have worked into stone from prehistory to the present: matters of time, identity and belonging; of skill and aesthetics; of making and memory. Written, designed and edited by Mark Edmonds with additional contributions from Hugo Anderson-Whymark, Ann Clarke, Antonia Thomas, Neil Firth and Andrew Parkinson.