1999 Detroit Show Report

   The show was held at a new location this year, the community center at Macomb College. It proved to be a great improvement, clean and well lit, in a nice suburban neighborhood - quite free of the vaguely sinister aura of the old location. Next year’s show will be even better, as everything will be on one floor in one large open building, instead of on two floors with displays and dealers squirreled away in odd nooks and crannies. Access this year was made difficult by a parade blocking the main drag; that and the ongoing football game kept attendance down on the Saturday we were there.

   I didn’t spot anything in the way of new minerals, as major discoveries are usually debuted at the bigger shows these days. I must admit I was looking mostly for micromaterial, and the budget was tight, so I may have missed something. Lots of nice specimens were available from a variety of dealers, and, this being Michigan, ("Copper Country"), some nice native copper was in evidence, in crystal groups to 8 cm and a few thousand dollars. Along the lines of recent if not new discoveries, I did see a small lot of quite pretty Mexican hemimorphite, in sparkling clusters; one nice metatorbernite specimen from France, and a couple of dozen very nice Russian orpiments, the latter at unusually reasonable prices. A gem dealer had some spectacular cut stones that caught my eye, including a flawless Pakistani peridot of 30 carats and huge orange facetted Mexican jelly opal to perhaps 3 cm across. I was lucky enought to find dealer who had a nice lot of old Phoenixville, Pennsylvania pyromorphite crystals, nice loose green floaters to 15 mm, and I took them all. The eleven mines in the Phoenixville area are long closed, operated from the 1850's to the 1920's, so specimens are rarely available. An uninspiring specimen of metatorbernite from the Congo (formerly Zaire) also came home with me, and has been turned into many spectacular micromounts. Upstairs in the swapper’s room I came across a nice siegenite from Missouri’s Buick Mine. It’s 6 cm across, a solid sparkling druse of tiny bright metallic crystals, for only $20 Cdn.!

   Some of the fossils offered for sale were particularly impressive. A spectacular 50 cm square plate from the Green River Formation in Wyoming, with a couple of good-sized Diplomystus (?) was available for about $600. A Chinese crinoid, about 40 cm long on a round plate of matrix could be had for about $1000, and a nice 6 cm T-Rex tooth could be taken home for a few grand or so. Lots of other, more affordable fossils were also available; trilobites from many localities were as low as $10, and crinoid calyxs the size of golf balls, from Oklahoma, were under $20. And if you didn’t want to spend any money at all, the cases of fossils on display upstairs were alone worth the trip.

   There were at least thirty cases of minerals and fossils on display. As usual they ranged from the mundane to the spectacular. Few of the mineral cases impressed me, but the fossil displays blew me away. A case of Oklahoma crinoids, loose calyxs golf ball size or bigger, including one matrix plate with fourteen of them, was nice to see. One case was filled with unbelievable things from a famous locality in Germany, the quality of preservation and preparation on these was astonishing. Imagine a 7 cm water strider, and other exquisite rarities, all with the thinnest, longest, most insectile features beautifully preserved. Several other fossil cases of this calibre were present as well, featuring superb US crinoids and trilobites from private collections. Peter Russell of Waterloo University, Ontario, brought a nice mammoth skull that had to be a meter and a half long, an impressive beast.

   The mineral cases weren’t terribly interesting this year; I’d like to see more emphasis on quality over quantity. The Carnegie case, if I remember correctly, had the highest quality pieces, with really exquisite acanthite, purple adamite, and others. One case had a surprising arrary of the very rare tellurium minerals of Moctezuma, Mexico; but almost without exception they were microscopic and there’s little use displaying things that can’t be seen with the naked eye. The ROM had a case showing some of the historic mineral specimens they’ve stumbled across whilst moving things around and installing their new mineral gallery. The specimens dated back to 1910 but weren’t too interesting, especially when arranged in the midst of various screwdrivers, squares, and other construction tools intended, in the ultra-hip modern curatorial style, to symbolize the reconstruction effort.

   Before the day was over we managed to attend a couple of slide show lectures, and they were quite enjoyable. Jeff Scovil gave us a tour of Prague and the Munich Show, and in the late afternoon Dan Behnke covered the mines and microminerals of Cornwall, England, which was a fine conclusion to a very pleasant and productive day.