As collectors, the main question we want answered is, "Can I get one?". We also want to know the answers to the related questions: "How good does this mineral get?", "How does this one compare with others of its kind." or "What is it going to cost me? These kinds or questions are not often addressed in the mineralogical literature and is widely scattered among different sources. It appeared that no one was going to write about these things, so I thought I would start. When I began the task I it quickly became apparent why no one was interested in writing about it. The scope of the project is so huge that no person could ever hope to finish it in a life time. But I soldiered on and have more or less taken a swipe at most of the minerals beginning with A and at a number of others as the opportunity presented itself.

In my early years I had taken thousands of pictures of fine specimens in various private and public collections and I thought I could use those to illustrate the text. I began by describing all those specimens from the various localities that I had pictures of. Then I went through the Mineralogical Record’s 25 year index and wrote about the good specimens from those localities. When this was done I found that there were still more than100 mineral species beginning with A which were not mentioned in the 25 year index of the Mineralogical Record. These were the hard ones. I had, in most instances, to go directly to the scientific literature and try and glean what information I could about those species. Since the pickings here were indeed slim, where I could, I consulted with rare species dealers, or in some cases with the people who collected the specimens. It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to find out how big the largest crystals are, how much of it was collected and when and what the best specimens look like etc.

This page is still under construction, and will probably never be completed. There are no pictures yet. There are many pages of descriptive text about various minerals from a large number of localities. The minerals that begin with A have more than 200 pages of information alone. The minerals that begin with B a pretty spotty after Barite and the rest of the alphabet is really slim pickings. To see if I have written about the mineral you are interested in, click on the letter the mineral begins with and wait. In the case of the A minerals you may need to wait a while for the data to load, so don’t give up.

If you spot any errors or omissions I would enjoy hearing about them. If you have special information about minerals that are not mentioned, I would very much like to hear from you.