Blogs
After a long time preparing it, we are happy to be offering here on e-Rocks the B. Florin collection.
During the last week in February we made contact with Nottinghamshire based collector Alan Peckover; he was looking for a buyer for his collection of minerals.
After some discussion and a visit to see the collection a sale was agreed, and pick up date arranged.
The logistics behind such an arrangement have been arranged many times before but we have found that every collection is different and usually something is thrown up to complicate matters.
Yesterday George was off at a stag party so I was left in charge of setting up the new auctions beginning on the day.
One of the sub tasks required is to cross check and ensure that any new localities added to the database are cross checked online and within our existing data.
It is always a great opportunity to review and study what new things are coming along, especially minerals and localities we have not come across before.
Working with old collections will often throw up unexpected snippets of information, "factoids", or link to some other part of a mineralogical jigsaw.
Recently spotted stowed away in Norman Cogger's collection was a specimen of "Gold", Banket Ore; a piece of conglomerate white quartz cemented together with further dark sulphide bearing quartz, but no visible gold!
Having now researched this term, Banket ore does indeed refer to a type of quartz conglomerate found mostly in the reefs at Witwatersrand in what was the Transvaal.
Late last year we reported on a new find of very fine large specimens of blödite & kröhnkite from Coronel Manuel Rodriguez Mine, Mejillones, Antofagasta Region, Chile.
This locality is an old open cast working for the extraction of copper set in an arid climate on the Mejillones peninsula. The locality is host to a number of sulphate and phosphate minerals including an exceptional recent find of destinezite. Kröhnkite has also been reported from there.
Jill Brunner's listing in her current Kalahari Classics Auction for a calcite and pyrite specimen from NChwanning takes the mineral additions on e-Rocks to #640000, or 140,000 items added since in October 2015.
Jill was the lucky "winner" of this accolade with Item #630000 last December.
The last 10,000 specimens have taken 57 days to compile (one day longer than before but we have had a few holidays inbetween!!). The daily tickover rate for the period has been 175 items per day.
Also in this period we have raised an average of 158 orders per day.
Today we have begun the deployment of many new changes to e-Rocks.
We are working behind the scenes to introduce many new features for both desktop and mobile users of our site, and today’s upgrade represents the first stage along the way, primarily for desktop users
If you are user on the site you will see 4 main changes, 3 of which are interactive and the third is output in purchase invoices.
The use of the new features is of course optional but you must be logged in to use them!
1/ My Items Filter – the “Wedding Rings” filter.
I spotted this wonderful photo of cuprorivaite posted by Joy Desor in a recent auction.
Of course cuprorivaite has nothing to do with wulfenite apart from its tetragonal crystals with flattened tabular habit as shown.
Chemically it has a formula CaCu[Si4O10] and occurs in volcanic complexes, type locality is Vesuvius, Italy and also Eifel in Germany, as is Joy's example.
Those of you who read my last Oxford Show report will remember a mention of Paul Nicholson at Waveney Minerals.
We have known Paul as a collector for well over 15 years, and more recently as an occasional show dealer in the UK. As of the last Show report Paul has done nothing much online.
Finally my words of persuasion have convinced him to have a go on e-Rocks, and of course he (and anyone else?) is very welcome.
Fingers crossed this will be the beginning of more regular listings from Waveney Minerals.
As we head towards Twelfth Night and the final demise of Christmas trees worldwide, we have got back to work with quite a bump.
Over the last few days we have been finalising a very large software release and plan to get this deployed in the next week or so. We will let you know when this is happening and tell you what to look out for.
The e-Rocks Christmas/New Year programme continues with the "pulling" of the Christmas Cracker tonight.
It is January 1st 2018 and welcome back to a new year of minerals and other things going on, on e-Rocks.
I promised Carsten last week to make sure there was a "liroconite alert" in place for his auction closing tonight. A fitting start to the New Year indeed.
According to George the January programme has filled up and we can look forward to a full and varied mineralogical diet to begin the year, unlike the diet of denial I have promised myself.
Over the Christmas break we have signed up some new sellers, so we should be getting these on stream shortly.
On our way home, we recently encountered an unusual - for mineral collectors - scenery: a snow-covered Saint Marie-aux-Mines!
With these pictures Plinius Earth Treasures wishes all its e-rocks friends a Happy 2018 full of health, joy and new specimens.
Worry not: we will take care of this last part. New rocks are on their way! :)
Mineralogically yours truly,
Chris Mavris,
Plinius - Earth Treasures
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Today 30 December is the last day of auctions for e-Rocks in 2017, and quite a year it has been both on and off "the pitch".
The Piatek Minerals auction closing at 23:40 tonight will be the final and 1839th auction during 2017; a year when we have seen the daily mineral digest increase to routinely 6 seller auctions per day.
Here we are with another auction close coming up for a specimen of liroconite.
This specimen is a nice thumbnail with abundant blue crystals from German seller Karin’s Mineral Shop.
Liroconite is a comparatively rare mineral and because of this and it’s wonderful blue colour quite a hard mineral to track down. Apart from a reference piece at the most recent Oxford Show, The only specimen I recall seeing at a UK show in 2017 was at Hayward’s Heath in November: that was chalcanthite too.
Jill Brunner's listing of anglesite with galena inclusion from Tsumeb has just chalked up item #630000, or 130,000 items added to the e-Rocks database since we renumbered the inventory in October 2015.
Previously we reported item #620000 was added on 31 October or 56 days ago, meaning that the last 10,000 minerals have been added at a rate of over 178 items per day. This is a 10% increase from the previous 10,000 minerals.
Also in the same period we have raised an average of 156 orders per day.
It is proving to be a very busy season!
Last weekend was the last planned road trip for George and I for 2017. We were off to sunny Kent to pick up Norman Cogger's collection, and so there is it all packed and ready to come back.
Remarkably we have found space to store it!
At TV Towers we have had a busier year than ever and it is a bit sad that it is nearly over.
The e-Rocks Christmas and holiday features are all set up with a whole range of different mineral listings coming up from now until the New Year. Please check out the auction and seller pages to see what is what.
This project is all about new finds which were confirmed by XRD and other methods.
It will be updated from time to time.
The download of the file for December 2017 is available here:
http://mineralanalytik.de/images/REMBILDER/mineralreport3.pdf
Some years ago, around 2010 news started to trickle out about spectacular finds of collectable mineral specimens in Inner Mongolia. The first deposits brought back memories of Dal'negorsk as the geology and minerals like Ilvaite showed similarities. However, the Huanggang mine(s) north of Beijing were not the only mines in the area producing interesting minerals for the collecting community.
Along with everything else that is going on we have been doing some background work on some phosphate minerals spurred on by a request by seller Modris Baum (LMB Minerals) and something he had discovered on a Brazilian hureaulite specimen.
Modris has been doing some investigation on the matrix of his specimen to try and determine the minerals it comprises of.
His investigation had lead him to a conclusion that the matrix was manganese rich rockbridgeite and with some interesting replacement of vivianite within - (could the vivianite be phosphoferrite? - ed).
Life at TVM isn't all about swaning off to shows, buying minerals or photographing/describing things for our weekly lists.
All this activity leads to one thing: an untidy stock room. Usually we can survive for a few months before needing to tidy up. For one reason or another this year we haven't had a good sort out since March.
George and I decided to set aside 2 days down time this week to tackle our workroom and regain some organisation to the daily routine.
We got our new xray diffractometer this week. It will come with a two dimensional detector which enables out of plane bragg peak measurement. This allows ultra fast measurements or extremely low concentrations of mineral samples.
In 2018 we will offer a comprehensive section of analytical tools which will allow fast and reliable analysis. We hope to work with a lot of collectors and publish reports in a digital form about new finds or print them in magazines. Our own reports will be free in a downloadable form and open source.
I was visiting an e-Rocks customer the other day, and was awestruck by his collection of radio-active artefacts.
Many things have changed over the years as learning and science have made our lives safer, but looking back some of these are just incredible.
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As we announced a few weeks ago the Russell Society has been tendering for a purchaser for the Norman Cogger collection.
The process has now been completed and we are pleased to announce that we, TVM are the successful bidders.
Having evaluated the collection we found out it has a particularly interesting dimension to the catalogue.
Norman Cogger was a geochemist and has completed a whole range of "wet chemical" analyses for his minerals. These have been written up full detail and indexed with each item record.
Today was our last show outing for the 2017 Season, Oxford Show is the last mineral show on the UK circuit for 2017.
To this end it was rather nice to be greeted with a Christmas tree in the foyer, certainly set the scene for a fun morning at the show.
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A little self indulgence here; not only is liroconite one of the "holy grail" UK minerals, it is one of my favourites!
This specimen listed by Carsten is small but exhibits excellent crystals, and is beautifully photographed!
Check out the other photos via the item link below.
Definitely worth calling out!
Thanks Carsten!
Long time e-Rocks seller Gábor Koller has hit the news recently in his native Hungary!
Congratulations to Gábor and his discovery and subsequent IMA approval/publishing of the new mineral rudabányaite.
Gábor self collected the then unknown specimens 17 years ago at the site of the former iron working, Adolf Mine in the Rudabánya, Rudabányai Mountains, Hungary.
Unrecognised, some of the material was sent for testing, and analysis showed the mineral to have a unique chemistry, being a mercury, silver arsenate.
A few weeks ago I was contacted by a local family who had a quantity of minerals, fossils and shells they had acquired during their times abroad in the Arabian Gulf.
They live only a few minutes from TV Towers so there was no difficulty in visiting to take a look for them.
The collection was quite extensive, comprising of a large quantity pieces that one would expect to see from that part of the world, except one piece of hematite from Cumbria!
George and I were discussing a mineral "anatolyite" newly added to the e-Rocks database, and couldn't find out who it was named for via the usual sources.
We know Anatoly Kasatkin very well, and through his involvement with systematic minerals and the Fersman Museum thought it might be him.
George suggested we should drop him a line to find out, and thanks to Anatoly we now have the answer!
Anatolyite is named to honour Anatoly Boldyrev who was Professor of Crystallography and Mineralogy in Leningrad in first half of 20th century.
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George and I were on the road early today to visit the 2017 Sussex Mineral & Lapidary Society Show (SMLS) at Haywards Heath.
This was the first time we have been to the show since 2010; e-Rocker Trevor Devon also Treasurer of the SMLS suggested we should attend when we met at Bakewell.
Giuseppe Siccardi of Yourmineral Collection in Italy emailed me at the end of last month to tell me of some changes with his business.
Giuseppe has been trading under Yourmineral collection (item code YMC) with e-Rocks since the end of 2007.
Now 10 years later in conjunction with Roberto Bracco, Giuseppe has divided Yourmineral Collection into two operations.