Prelude

The world really doesn’t need another book on minerals.  Quite frankly, mineral collectors don’t need another book on minerals, either.  How many different ways can anyone say that the hardness of quartz is 7 and pyrite is also known as “Fool’s Gold”?  As far as many mineral collectors are concerned, there really was little need to publish another mineral book after Frederick Pough’s A Field Guide to Rocks and Minerals.  This wonderful little book was all we needed to start - and grow - in the mineral hobby.  It gave us all the necessary information and a bunch of great pictures, too.

Having said all this, I must admit I am still a sucker for mineral books.  Vacations always include time to browse through used bookstores where old copies of mineral books pop up rather frequently.  Better yet, God gave us eBay!  (My downfall and new addiction, now that I’ve given up Coca Cola.)  Mineral books of all kinds, shapes, sizes and ages right at your fingertips.  Most can be picked up for a small investment.  I haven’t yet been able to convince the kids to eat peanut butter for a week so I can buy the $600 antique editions, so I stick to the “$20 and under” section.

As I get older, I find it deeply rewarding to just sit with a cup of coffee and browse through the nearly endless variety of coffee table books and Mineralogical Record back issues, just drooling over the superb pictures.  In this way it’s fun to be an aging collector:  one can return to his or her youth, avoid the text altogether and enjoy the remarkable photos of new and classic mineral specimens.

So what’s the point of this series?  If we don’t need another mineral book, why bother to write more about minerals?  In 1997 I discovered the terrific mineral magazine Matrix, published – and largely written by – Jesse “Jay” Lininger.  The concept of recording and writing about the people and places connected to minerals ignited something in me; perhaps it was the simple reality that people, history and artifacts make the specimens that much more beautiful and exciting.  (It was a terribly sad day when the news spread across the rockhound email groups that Jay Lininger had passed away of a heart attack. 

My immediate reaction when I read the news was that his passing marked the end of something unique and very special in the mineral collecting community.)  Feeling there is little that I or anyone else could add to the field guide branch of our hobby and knowing that my humble little collection contains nothing of the “spectacular” range (or “killer” as show promoter and collector extraordinaire Marty Zinn is known to say) to feature in a picture book, it seemed that a few stories, fun facts and assorted opinions just might be of interest to others.  You will see rather quickly that this little “volume” is different than the field guides and picture books.  At the very least, I hope this ebook might be entertaining for you when you find yourself sitting in a hotel room in Tucson some fine February day, trying to rest your blistered feet before reviewing a few more miles of dealers’ tables and displays.

In short, the point of this endeavor is to have a little mineralogical fun.  It may spark memories of similar stories in your collecting experiences.  A classic it is not.  (It is so much not a classic that I didn’t even bother sending a manuscript out to the big publishing houses.  I decided to skip the heartache and go straight to the public on my own.)  Anyway, you must agree that the people, places and experiences interwoven with our mineral collecting make it all that much more wonderful.

You will find these pages decorated with charming mineral drawings by mineral artist Darryl Powell.  Any artist always has that wonderful luxury of perspective:  even the most average specimen, you know the one with that horrible ding on the most obvious crystal face, can be as perfect and world-class as the artist wants it to be.

Lastly, you may ask “What is a mineralosopher?”  A philosopher is, rather literally, a lover of wisdom.  The word philosophy is derived from the Greek words phileo meaning love and sophia meaning wisdom.  Hence, lover of wisdom.  It follows to reason, therefore, that a mineralosopher is someone who has wise thoughts about minerals.  So I have decided that I am a mineralosopher.  Certainly there are much more intelligent, much more informed mineralosophers out there.  Many of them are already writing great pieces for Mineralogical Record, Rocks & Minerals, and the rest.  They just haven’t been given the formal and important-sounding title of mineralosopher.

Please enjoy Mineralosophy:  some random philosophical thoughts on minerals.  There will be no logical order to the chapters that will follow in the months to come.  Each will be an admittedly random thought that simply popped into my mind for some reason.  I can say that the next  entry, Chapter 1, will be titled “Keeping Lists:  Write It Down!”

If you would like to make a comment or add your mineralosophical thought, please email me through this website by the link below.  The webmaster will add your thoughts as they arrive.