FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[daviddillman]

Thanks to everyone for your responses.

Jason your comment about Texas have a disproportionate number of buyers flush with cash is interesting. I did not know mineral collecting was especially popular in this area.
I am beginning to suspect that higher end dealers in TX are probably I very high cost way of shopping. First the TX economy has been much stronger than the rest of the USA for some time. Second conspicuous consumption is something of a hobby in TX. I realize it is a stereotype but I think it is quite valid.

Jordi: Thanks for providing this forum; I have been reading the links you mentioned.

I found the topic "Tucson 2008, questionable prices?" very interesting. I sounds like there a plenty of dealers who apply astronomical mark ups to some specimens and just hope a novice (like myself) will buy it without realizing something similar can be found somewhere else. I have noticed attempt to create what I would call a "fashion show" or "art museum" type of atmosphere with some dealers. I imagine this should make me wary of pricing.

Thanks again everyone.

[John S. White]

The biggest flaw in Jason's argument about travelling to source areas to get good buys is that there is no guarantee that the buyer will find anything when he gets there. At these source areas fine specimens don't just sit around waiting for a buyer to show up. One often hears of dealers coming back empty from a buying trip because there was nothing being mined at the time or they just got beaten to the good stuff by another dealer who showed up the day before.

Yes, one can recite anecdotal examples of good buys being made by collectors at source areas, but these are relatively rare occurrences, in my experience. Add to that the old axiom that specimens are the most expensive closest to their source. This is not exactly what Jason is talking about but, for example, the very worst place to hope to get a good deal on an azurite from Bisbee would be in Bisbee.

[Jesse Fisher]

The best minerals almost always change hands in private and out of public view. Traveling to an area such as Minas Gerais or Peshawar the unconnected collector may be able to come away with some "souvenir" quality specimens, but you are highly unlikely to encounter anything really good on the open market. These sort of specimens will invariably be reserved for dealers or perhaps wealthy or obsessive collectors who have developed personal connections with the producers. While traveling to mineral-producing locations is highly educational, and just plain fun for those inclined to travel in the first place, unless you have the time and money to cultivate a relationship with the producers, it is perhaps best to seek out the dealers who already have. A dealer will usually purchase a volume of material from a mine-owner in order to get access to the best specimens. Unless you, as a collector, are willing to deal with selling on hundreds of wholesale quality specimens you might not want for your own collection, it is easier to go to the dealer who is, and get to know him or her. You will, of course, pay premium price for the premium specimens, but this is how business works.

The best (and perhaps only) way to really become successful at putting together a top quality collection to to go to shows, meet people in the hobby/business, learn what you personally like and want to collect, and get a good feeling for what the market values for these specimens are. The relationships you build with dealers, suppliers, and other collectors you meet will be invaluable if you stick with mineral collecting for any length of time.

As someone new to mineral collecting, I would add a note of caution. If it becomes known that you have a fair amount of money to spend, and are new and inexperienced at understanding the relative value of mineral specimens, there are no shortage of dealers who will gladly offer you seemingly desirable specimens at rather highly inflated prices. Getting an education has it's costs, no matter where you go to school, and I suspect that all of us have, on occasion, paid way to much for specimens we have acquired for our collections. The only way to defend yourself against this is by getting that education. Expect to make mistakes, but be prepared to learn from them.

[John S. White]

Jason made the following statement in one of his postings, and it didn't sound at all reasonable to me:

"The jeremehevite (sic)..when skip simmons was in erongo at the aqua pockets the miners would just throw out jeremejevite crystals. he said and showed me pics of small piles of them just tossed aside. "

So I checked with Skip Simmons and this is what he had to say about the jeremejevite:

"Amazing how things get modified in the translation. When we were at the mines in the Erongos in 2003, we did in fact collect VERY SMALL FRAGMENTS of jeremejevite crystals in the debris around the pockets where some of the nice jeremejevite crystals were originally found. There was a lot of pocket debris scattered about the larger pockets and careful searching produced numerous fragments of jeremejevite. These were of interest to us as we had never collected jeremejevite and we thought it was pretty cool to find. But these pieces were really too small to have much (any?) commercial value and that is why the material wasn’t carted off. I have given several talks about that and subsequent trips and described finding this jeremejevite. I also showed crystals that we bought from the miners and someone may have thought that those were material that we found in the debris. There also may be confusion with my description of collecting schorl crystals in the pocket debris. I described collecting very nice schorl crystals in the debris around a number of different pockets. Most anywhere else these crystals would have definitely been collected by the miners and not abandoned. For whatever reasons there was a lot of schorl and some good crystals. I suspect that the two stories may have gotten muddled in someone’s recollection.

So the miners were definitely not throwing away jeremejevite crystals."

I think it is important that such misrepresentations be identified and corrected.

[daviddillman]

John,

Thanks for researching this story. It did sound too good to be true.

[alfredo]

To add to what John wrote on the slim chances of a novice buyer getting any great deals "at the source":

Local dealers in Third World mining districts will generally NOT show new visiting buyers their best pieces, for several reasons: 1) They frequently have long established relations with a dealer or dealers they trust, so better stuff is reserved for those people while newcomers are offered the dregs. Rock Currier disagrees with me on this point; he thinks Third World dealers are mostly so hungry for money that everything is instantly on sale to the first comer with cash and nothing is held back, but I don't find that to be the case in Andean countries at least, although I can't say anything about Africa or Asia, not having much experience there.
2) An increasing number of Third World miners and dealers bring things to Tucson, Ste Marie or Munich themselves, and they save their better pieces in order to make a bigger "splash" at the show, just selling off enough lesser stuff in advance at home to finance the trip.
3) A lot of Third World miners and dealers are canny enough to hide the "good stuff" (often for months or a couple years) until all the lesser stuff is sold, on the theory that no one will want third-rate material after they've seen the "good stuff". And when they DO show you the top stuff, the price asked will be astronomical, often far more than that piece will eventually sell for at Tucson. That seems at first sight illogical, but it makes sense to the seller. Almost all Third World miners now have access to the internet and they check the top international dealers' websites and marvel at the prices asked for specimens from the miner's home country. They now dream of getting those same prices for less-than-perfect specimens, which of course they won't get, but a few potential buyers have to reject the pieces first before the asking price comes down to realistic levels. It used to be axiomatic that "the early bird gets the worm" and the first dealer on the scene of a new find made a killing, but nowadays it is often rather a case of "the second mouse gets the cheese". Anyway, thanks to the internet, the old "neocolonialist" practices of the 1970s and 80s, where itinerant First World dealers would go to the source and buy $1,000 rocks for $1 and a few bottles of beer, are over. Gone. And rightfully so, in my opinion.