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The Heidelberger Mineralien-Comptoir, founded by one of Germany's early popularizers of mineral collecting, supplied collectors and institutions worldwide with mineral specimens for over 125 years. Though little remembered today, it [...]

Since 1967 the Sakoany area on the northwestern coast of Madagascar has yielded many hundreds of tons of geodes lined with beautiful blue celestine crystals, the world's finest examples of [...]

The chrome-green nodules, riddled with veins of various other phosphates, make splendid display specimens when slabbed and polished. The mine is also the type locality for the phosphates englishite, gordonite, [...]

One of the most exciting specimens on display at the 1986 Munich Show was a sperrylite from the Talnakh orefield, Norilsk region. In the years since then, additional sperrylite specimens [...]

For over 80 years the Tweefontein farm in the Transvaal province of South Africa has been famous among mineralogists and mineral collectors for producing some of the world's largest and [...]

HISTORY The Romans were surely involved in mining in the Alston Moor area, but the oldest surviving records of mining in northern England tell us that silver and lead were [...]

INTRODUCTION The West Cumbrian Iron Orefield is not a name familiar to many collectors as a 'classic' locality. However, the names Frizington, Egremont and Cleator Moor immediately conjure images of [...]

HISTORY The Fallowfield mine is situated in St. John's Lee parish, about 2 miles north of the village of Hexham, Acomb, Tyne Valley, Northumberland. The workings extend for roughly 1.5 [...]

INTRODUCTION The Hilton mine is among the best known of the Cumbrian fluo-rite localities, famous for brilliant yellow crystals of large size. The mine is located near the head of [...]

INTRODUCTION Excellent fluorite specimens have come from a number of mines in the Weardale region since mining began there in the 12th century. Fortunately for the collecting community, there was [...]

It has taken nearly 50 years to assemble the Greenbank collection. It is an amalgamation of the personal collections of a number of contemporary collectors, active from the 1960s to [...]

Emeralds have been mined in Zambia since 1928. However, hardly any specimen-quality crystals were saved until 80 years later, when the management at the Kagem mine investigated the possibility of [...]

Large, beautiful, deeply etched crystals of yellow-green beryl from the Volodarsk-Volynski pegmatite district first reached the Western mineral market in 1980. The majority of specimen crystals known today were recovered [...]

Bryce McMurdo Wright Senior and Junior were among the best-known 19th-century mineral dealers in England, specializing in minerals from the famous Lake District. Major museums around the world, and particularly [...]

Since their discovery in the 1960s, the Merelani tanzanite deposits have produced countless thousands of beautiful crystals of gem-grade zoisite in a range of colors, including the coveted deep purplish [...]

Although the average ore grade at the Round Mountain mine is only around 0.02 ounces of gold per ton, spectacular finds of hundreds of ounces of beautiful crystallized gold have [...]

Painting photo-realistic still life scenes in oil is extremely difficult, and very few artists have mastered the age-old technique. Of those, almost none have devoted themselves to depicting historical scenes [...]

In the centuries-old history of mineral collecting, Miguel Romero was unique. Many people, of course, have enjoyed collecting Mexican minerals over the years, but he is the sole major collector [...]

California collector Hubert de Monmonier built a remarkable mineral collection of over 800 specimens, heavy in native gold and amethyst, and valued at over $7 million. In accordance with his [...]

The Emperor gold mine, perched on the side of a caldera on the island of Viti Levu in the Pacific Ocean, has been known as a source of native gold [...]

George Washington Fiss, one of the first and greatest of all micromounters, created two remarkable collections--one of them built, in part, by the extraordinary expedient of breaking small pieces off [...]

The first mechanical rock trimmer for trimming mineral specimens was invented by Frederick A. Canfield (1849-1926) of Dover, New Jersey around 1875. Canfield, one of America's leading mineral collectors of [...]

The Benitoite Gem mine (also known as the Benitoite mine, the Dallas Gem mine or simply the Gem mine) has been known for 100 years as the source of a [...]

John Grieger started a mineral business from his Pasadena home in 1930 and grew to be one of the principal suppliers of mineral specimens and lapidary materials in southern California. [...]

The Minh Tien pegmatite, located a few kilometers southeast of the town of Luc Yen in northern Vietnam, has yielded large and attractive divergent clusters of pink and raspberry-red to [...]

Illustrating the beauty and subtlety of the mineral world in published works has been a daunting challenge since the first woodcut engraving of a tourmaline crystal appeared in Conrad Gesner's [...]

He jovially described himself in a 1993 ad as: 'Mineralogist, bibliophile, gemologist, author, expert, Grolierite, lecturer, Kunzian, Novi Eboracian [=New Yorker], antiquary, numismatist, collector, publisher, appraiser, columnist, entrepreneur, historian, consultant, [...]

Wulfenite appears to be quite rare in China. Until recently, only a few mediocre specimens with small yellow to red crystals have reached the specimen market, from a rare-earth mine [...]

The Shimen realgar mine, which has been in more or less continuous operation for nearly 1500 years, has yielded world-class specimens of realgar and orpiment, associated with fine calcite crystals, [...]

World-class yellow-orange mimetite crystals to more than 2 cm, found at a mine in Guangdong province, China, first reached the world mineral market in January 2003. A total of several [...]

Arizona collector/dealer Wayne Thompson is not someone you're likely to forget after meeting. Thin, energetic and wiry, with strawberry-blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail, he is bursting with [...]

William Niven, a self-taught mineralogist, archeologist, prospector, miner, businessman, explorer, adventurer and raconteur, was a dedicated field collector who, for a time, was among the leading mineral dealers in New [...]

[October 28-30, 2005] The Munich Show this year was greeted by spectacularly fine and sunny weather--a nice 'welcome back' for my first trip to the Show since 1991. No longer [...]

The Mineralogical Record Label Archive is a collection of original, primarily pre-printed, mineral specimen labels representing mineral collections and dealerships worldwide during the last two centuries. With the possible exception [...]

Some of the finest amethyst specimens in the world have come from the remote mountains of the Sierra Madre del Sur of north-central Guerrero State in Mexico. Few outsiders have [...]

Yellow mimetite crystals from Namibia and China are considered to be the finest examples of the species, but attractive botryoidal specimens are so different in appearance that they tend to [...]

For decades the Ahumada lead mine in the Los Lamentos District, northeastern Chihuahua, has been famous among collectors for a single species: wulfenite. Los Lamentos ranks as one of the [...]

Jeremejevite is among the rarest of gem minerals. Some of the best crystals, water-clear and cornflower-blue, have come from a small oceanside occurrence in Namibia discovered in 1973. The site [...]

Two Chinese antimony mines have produced collector-quality stibnite crystals in recent years. The most recent of these to yield fine specimens is the Wuling antimony mine in Jiangxi Province. Highly [...]

Copper-bearing 'Paraiba tourmaline,' a geochemical oddity, was discovered in Brazil in 1988. Its rich and unique colors have given it extraordinary gemstone value, resulting in the preservation of very few [...]

Show promoter and mineral collector par excellence, Martin Zinn is one of those people everybody seems to know. Personable and efficient, he has changed the face of the mineral world [...]

The Castle Dome district is one of the oldest and longest-lived mining district in Arizona. The Hull and Puzzler mines have produced attractive combinations of barite, cerussite, fluorite, unusual green [...]

Edward R. Swoboda is noted for his collection of more than 300 specimens of pseudomorphs. He dropped out of Long Beach Junior College in 1937 and, in 1939, worked as hoist operator in Brazil where he made remarkable discoveries, such as the 25-cm phantom quartz crystal and the 45-cm Japan law quartz twin. He had also worked at the San Francisco mine in Sonora, CA, where highest quality wulfenite and mimetite crystals were found. By 1982, he sold his collection of 245 display specimens to Perkins Sam, who later sold it to the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Famous since the 1970's for beautifully crystallized gold, the Colorado Quartz mine near Mariposa, California, has recently yielded what may well be the finest specimen ever found at the mine, [...]

The North Geronimo mine, recently restaked as the Pure Potential claim, has produced excellent vanadinite specimens that are as good as or better than any from Arizona's other, more famous [...]

The world's most famous wulfenite occurrence is again yielding specimens, this time in unprecedented quantities. The current recovery operation, however, may eventually mean the end of this classic locality. INTRODUCTION [...]