Jordi Fabre
Overall coordinator of the Forum
Joined: 07 Aug 2006
Posts: 4902
Location: Barcelona
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Posted: Jul 22, 2007 06:55 Post subject: Histories and historical value |
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In our Spanish Forum Joan Rosell recently proposed creating a new topic concerning the histories relating to some specimens or personalities:
https://www.fabreminerals.com/forum/Foro-Mensajes/viewtopic.php?p=682#682
It is a kind of historical catalog, a place where anecdotes that increase for many people the value of their specimens, making them more personalized, can be collected.
I think that the idea is great, so I have already started this new topic in the Spanish forum and I also start here, in the English Forum, the same thing. The idea is that everybody having a story that is funny, exciting or just different, relating to his or her personal adventures or other collector's adventures, can write about it and have it published here. I believe that the collection of texts could become a very interesting set, that someday perhaps could be published in another format. If mineral magazines or publications wish to use them we will be very happy to make them available, considering it an opportunity to increase the number of people knowing this historic legacy.
Let me start this topic myself by relating one story involving the famous Spanish collector Joaquín Folch i Girona, Bill Pinch, and myself:
In 1970, while still very young, I met Sr. Folch in his home hoping to see his collection. Considering my youth, Sr. Folch felt it necessary to submit me to a kind of hidden "quality proof". He showed to me some minerals in his drawers and he selected one of the ugliest, telling me that "he forgot" the name of this particular specimen and that he can just remember the locality: Terlingua, Texas, and that it was a mercury species. Coincidentally I had just read in some book about montroydites from Terlingua, so by a kind of miracle I answered his question properly, saying montroydite!. He then he smiled and opened to me the "Holy Grail" doors of his home.
The story did not end there. Ever funnier is that in Tucson, 2006, I met Bill Pinch and he told to me that the montroydites from Folch's collection, that he himself had traded with Folch, were not montroydites but comancheites, and that in this case they were among the world's best for this rare species, especially considering that Terlingua's deposit is actually exhausted so there is no chance to find more of them. When I returned to Barcelona I ordered an analysis of Folch’s Terlingua specimens and, of course, they are comancheites.
It is really funny that the right answer that opened to me the doors to Folch’s home was actually a mistake! That's life, we suppose we know a lot of things and really we don't know so much because often things we think we know are wrong...
Jordi |
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