The best book for beginners that I have seen is the Rutten and VanVenrooij book "Telescope Optics Evaluation and Design" that Willmann-Bell has available. It`s $25 and you should get the software that comes with it for another $25. There`s a large part of the book that deals with the design of lenses and there is even a table of the Indices of Refraction for many of the glasses that are readily available. I consider it to be a very good selfteaching book on the subject. After reading through the book you will realize that reverse engineering the surplus lenses will be a very difficult job at best.
Another source of optics stuff is the Edmund Scientific line of thier cheap booklets. They are crammed with a HUGE amount of very interesting data and are very understandable on thier own. They are `50s style drawings and so forth but you don`t need pretty graphics to understand the principles involved. You`re looking at about $75 of expenditures which is very little considering the total amount of knowledge that is contained in all of those books. I`d say go get them and start reading and playing. You will quickly understand the differences between all the telescope designs and be able to talk to Roland Christian and understand what he is saying.