Synopsis
This impressive book showcases the beauty of nature's finest art - minerals! The best of them have the same attributes (and values) as the finest paintings and sculptures. Whether you are a newcomer to the mineral world or a seasoned collector, you will find this book fascinating. Images of spectacular minerals leap off the page with their vibrant colors and formations. Included are details about each specimen, historical or anecdotal. See what experts in the field consider a world-class specimen. The authors are passionate, lifelong collectors who have traveled the earth-sharing here their love of the beauty of these natural pieces of art, resources of our civilization and culture that are also treasures in and of themselves. To see photos of this beautiful book, use the following URL to see the review from @yahoo finance: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/arkenstone-announces-release-ikons-mineral-032000003.html and be prepared to be blown away.
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About the Authors
Wayne A. Thompson was born in Phoenix, a third-generation Arizonan. At the age of seven, after seeing his uncle’s mineral collection, he came to the realization that his interest in minerals involved only the very finest pieces. The differences in quality were very plain to his eyes. He soon had three newspaper routes, the proceeds from which he spent on minerals from local mineral dealers Scott Williams, Dave New, and Jim Mueller.
Once, after purchasing a flat of several nice pieces from Scott Williams, another collector came into Scott’s shop and purchased a single but much better specimen for the same total price. Wayne realized that he had made a mistake, and never repeated it.
He began collecting underground at the age of ten, joined the Arizona Mineralogical Society, and the local 4H club run by Marc and Cliff Watson that was devoted to mineral collecting. Mines and other mineral localities were visited almost every weekend.
Wayne then attended Arizona State University, majoring in geology. In his senior year, he visited the San Francisco mine in Sonora, Mexico, where he personally opened a pocket of wulfenite that was over 6 feet long and 4 by 5 feet across. This pocket was completely lined with wulfenite crystals up to 4 inches sitting on a bed of light orange mimetite. He immediately dropped out of college and never looked back.
However, he continued to read everything he could about minerals. He memorized the finest specimens of every collection he saw and every show he attended from age 10 onward, as well as every book he read, and every museum he visited, and built a mental catalog of world-class specimens. After decades of this cataloging, Wayne was able to apply this knowledge to help in building the collections of James Horner, Gene Meieran, Sandor Fuss, Karl Kempf, and Wayne Sorensen, and to supply world-class pieces to Steve Smale and Bill Larson.
Wayne has also mined specimens at almost every major locality in Arizona, leasing or owning many of them, and has found major pockets at the Red Cloud, Old Yuma, 79, and Tiger mines. Trips lasting three days underground were taken with fellow collectors Les Presmyk, Wendell Wilson, Mike New, Gary Fleck, and many others prominent in Arizona collecting.
Wayne secured commercial collecting contracts with Phelps Dodge Corporation at Bisbee, Morenci, Metcalf, and Ajo, Arizona, at Silver City in New Mexico, and with the Kennecott Copper Corporation at the Ray mine in Arizona. Through those contracts he collected many thousands of specimens including azurite stalactites at Morenci and chrysocolla pseudomorphs at the Ray mine.
Wayne partnered on many United States/Mexican projects with Ed Swoboda, Dick Bideaux, Bill Larson, Gary Hansen, and Gene Meieran, as well as Pierre Laville in Brazil, Tahir Iqbal in Pakistan, and Eric Asselborn in Europe. He and Mike New mined Guerrero and Las Vigas amethysts in Mexico and he also mined epidotes in Kenya with Campbell Bridges.
Wayne’s private collection, although small, has included many of the world’s finest mineral specimens.
He co-authored the predecessors to this book, Ikons, Classics, and Contemporary Masterpieces of Mineralogy in 2007 with Wendell E. Wilson; and Ikons: The Beauty of Fine Minerals in 2024 with Walter E. Donovan, Robert M. Lavinsky, Wendell E. Wilson, and Sandor P. Fuss. In addition, Wayne co-authored California Indian Basketry (another passion of his) with Gene Meieran.
Currently Wayne is enjoying being involved in a few select projects with both his ex-wife Malee Thompson and his daughter Stevia Thompson.
Walter E. Donovan is a retired engineer who was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1950 and, as a teenager, did lots of chemical experiments, blew up lots of stuff, built three Tesla coils, a 40-KV 200-joule cockroach and wood vaporizer, and managed to keep all his appendages. He also read every single science fiction and science book in the local library and started his personal science fiction collection in 1960 with Deathworld by Harry Harrison, a great book still. His collection now numbers more than 3,200 books, including Tschai by Jack Vance, from which the “Carabas” name for his family’s mineral collection originates.
Walt won a state-wide chemistry competition in high school with a $1,000 prize in 1966, serious money back then. He received a B.A. in math in 1970 from LaSalle College where, as a senior, he scored in the top 100 in the Putnam competition and took second place in the Society of Actuaries mathematics examination, both nationwide competitions. (Many years later, getting a top 100 on the Putnam got you an automatic job offer from Microsoft!) He was accepted as a research assistant at the University of Illinois and received an M.S. in computer science in 1973. He then worked at the Center for Advanced Computation at the university for several years on a project with the United States Department of Agriculture using satellite imagery to forecast crop production.
Walt moved to California with his newly wedded wife in 1980 and took a position designing image processing software and hardware for the United States Geological Survey, working at the NASA Ames Research Center, an amazing place to walk around. Once, he sneaked into one of the original Gemini capsules that had returned from space and discovered the hard way the reason why the astronauts were all short-statured. Fortunately, nothing was broken.
After stints at two failed startups, he went to Sun Microsystems where he designed 3D graphics hardware and drivers. After five years at Sun, he worked for a 3D graphics startup for two years, and then left to work at Nvidia as a systems architect. There, over more than 20 years, Walt designed multiple generations of texture processing hardware, defining several industry standards that everyone uses today in their computers and cell phones to generate compelling three-dimensional moving images. He holds more than 50 patents.
Walt has enjoyed playing computer games since his time on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois in the mid–1970s, and still does today, sometimes joined by his daughter and wife. He is still married to the same wonderful lady whom he met while she was also playing games on PLATO, and they have one awesome child. He has been hard of hearing since age two (probably caused by German measles) and mostly lip-reads with moderate accuracy. But he hears well enough to have a deep, abiding love of lyrical poetry.
So. Mineral collecting — how did that happen? A family visit to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show® in 2018 resulted in a shocking realization that minerals could actually be both beautiful and acquirable. By purest chance, his daughter Alyssa met Rob Lavinsky and was invited to visit the Arkenstone mineral dealership in Texas. After a few months of ever-escalating purchases, Walt and his family began serious mineral collecting in June of 2018. They wish to thank their mentors Rob Lavinsky, Barry Kitt, Daniel Trinchillo, Sandor Fuss, and Stuart Wilensky, without whose help the family collection would be a shadow of its current self.
Walt met Wayne Thompson at the Tucson Show in 2020 while Wayne was standing in front of Walt’s family’s display case, admiring their Carabas collection. They both told the other they wanted to write a book, and the result three years later is what
Dr. Robert Lavinsky is a lifelong lover of natural beauty, and it was as a fossil collector at age 11 that he accidentally stumbled into the world of mineral shows and exhibits. That introduced him to the sport of collecting this particular facet of Nature’s Art and triggered a life-long addiction. The influence of great mentors in the Columbus, Ohio club and the book Gem & Crystal Treasures by Peter Bancroft changed his life forever.
Rob formed his addiction-enabling business The Arkenstone, Ltd. in 1986 (while reading The Hobbit) and went online as irocks.com in 1994, one of the first retail websites for mineral collectors. He coded the website from simple HTML code programmed from the first edition of HTML for Dummies!
Rob spoke Russian at the time (before switching to Chinese), which helped his growing business as Russia opened up and minerals flowed out, particularly through friends at the Fersman Mineralogical Museum of Moscow. From 1995 to 2000, he worked on his doctorate in genetic engineering at the University of California; his side business in minerals quickly grew during those years while working long hours in the laboratory. His business became the largest of its kind on the early internet for the new art class of fine minerals and crystals during the 1990s. Following graduation, he went full-time into the mineral business and never looked back. Today, irocks.com and its sister website, mineralauctions.com, together host the largest private archive of mineral sales records and information online.
Rob now runs a large sales gallery and private museum in Dallas, and travels the world, both to buy specimens and to educate himself. His goal is to broadly increase education and awareness of mineral collecting to help develop and enrich rural mining economies and teach them to preserve these treasures (especially in Peru and China). To this end, he spends much time on educational efforts, working with government institutions in China and the United States to display “Minerals as Art” with a beauty-first approach, to attract new interest to the field, and to preserve these resources. He also acts as a consultant for private collectors and museums.
Rob’s private collection of Chinese minerals is one of the largest assembled with a focus on representing the breadth of minerals from a single country, and he has written an educational book on the subject (available free at chinacrystallinetreasures.com). ShanShan Sun, Rob’s wife, is an indispensable part of the business and his sourcing in China.
Rob is, with Gene Meieran, the co-founder of The Dallas Mineral Collector Symposium. Designed for the education of the serious collector, this is the world’s only symposium dedicated to the growth of the field of fine mineral specimens as an emerging asset class. (DallasSymposium.org hosts archived content and videos.)
The new mineral “Lavinskyite” was named in his honor by a NASA-affiliated laboratory in 2013, in recognition of his contributions and support at the beginning of mindat.org in the late 1990s, and his continuing contribution of information and donation of minerals to multiple institutions.
Dr. Wendell E. Wilson, the longtime editor of the Mineralogical Record (since 1976), began collecting minerals at the age of ten, during a vacation trip to Lake Superior. In 1969, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in Duluth with a double major in Art and Geology, and minors in physics, chemistry, and math — prefiguring his lifetime involvement in both art and mineral science. He then moved on to Arizona State University near Phoenix to (1) collect at all of Arizona’s most famous mineral localities, and (2) earn a master’s degree in Mineralogy (in that order). While in Arizona, he teamed up with Wayne Thompson and various others for underground collecting at the Red Cloud, Rowley, Old Yuma, Apache, Ray, Silver Bill, Defiance, Grandview, Magma, Harquahala, Southwest (Bisbee), Grand Reef, Glove, J. C. Holmes, Inspiration, and 79 mines. At the latter, he found what are still considered to be the world’s finest specimens of aurichalcite.
Continuing his studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he earned his PhD in Mineralogy (specializing in isotopic age-dating) while also working on the first Lunar samples and writing his first article for the Mineralogical Record, which he joined as full-time editor upon graduation in 1976. Since then, Wendell has authored over 260 journal articles on minerals and mineral localities, 25 articles, and four books on mining history and collectibles (his latest book, the second edition of Antique Miners’ Candlesticks, was published in 2022), and nearly 2,000 biographies of people in the mineral world, alive and dead. He is also the founder of the Mineralogical Record Library, and the Mineralogical Record’s “Antiquarian Reprint Series,” established to preserve history’s rarest illustrated mineralogies.
The new mineral “wendwilsonite” was named in his honor in 1987 “in recognition of his contributions to mineralogy,” and the Mineralogical Record itself, under his editorship, was honored in 1982 by the naming of the new Tsumeb species, “minrecordite” for “promoting both a better knowledge of Tsumeb minerals and a more beneficial interaction between professional and amateur mineralogists.” The Record remains the only journal to have a mineral named in its honor. Wendell received the prestigious Carnegie Mineralogical Award in 2001 (“in recognition of outstanding contributions to mineralogy”), and the Mineralogical Record was granted the same honor in 1994.
Wilson is also a prominent mineral photographer and mineral artist, and collects various mining-theme memorabilia, as well as ceramics by the late Tucson artist Rose Cabat. Some of his mining artifacts appear as props in his paintings of underground mining scenes. His first mineral painting appeared on the cover of the November–December 1972 issue of Mineralogical Record (well before he became editor). His oil painting of an underground mining scene appeared on a cover of Rocks & Minerals. His series of fantasy underground mineral-collecting scenes now numbers 14, and he has produced numerous specimen portraits in oil on canvas, watercolor, India ink, and mixed media, as well as several highly detailed mining still life paintings in oil on canvas, oil on copper, and India ink. Over the years Wendell has continued to produce artworks as time permits and has published over 1,000 mineral and mining artworks, and over 6,500 mineral photographs.
Wendell’s other interests include martial arts (he holds a black belt in Okinawan karate and authored a karate newsletter from 1994 to 1998), samurai swords, and Egyptology, including learning to read Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Sandor P. Fuss is a lifelong collector, dealer, and broker of collectibles in numerous fields including fine minerals, Himalayan art, antique Early American glass, 19th century European porcelain, and Japanese woodblock prints. Since 1986, his primary focus has been dealing with fine mineral specimens; at the age of 16, he started working in a small “rock shop” in his hometown of Chatham, Massachusetts. During his college years and until 1995, he set up as a mineral dealer at shows around New England and at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show®. He then got a job as the lead salesperson for Bryan Lees at Collector’s Edge Minerals in Golden, Colorado.
In 2003, Sandor left Collector’s Edge and started Fuss International, LLC, which to this day engages in the wholesale brokering of Japanese woodblock prints, fine mineral specimens, and early American glass. The objects that he has handled throughout his career now grace numerous collections and have been published in a wide variety of books and periodicals.
Sandor also owns Mile High Mineral Cleaning Laboratory, LLC, which for the last 20 years has been one of the premier mineral specimen preparation labs in the world. The lab cleans, trims, repairs, and restores natural mineral specimens per the requests of the clients based on the best course of action needed to improve the specimen. The day-to-day operations of the lab are overseen by his longtime associate, Riva DaSilva, who is also a dealer in fine mineral specimens. Riva’s company Brazarte sets up at the annual Tucson and Denver Gem and Mineral shows. The lab has prepared tens of thousands of mineral specimens, primarily for mineral dealers, and has become an integral part of the worldwide mineral collecting business.
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