What's New in Minerals

摘要

To begin, let's compare some images from the Old World with some from the New. In my yearly reports on the Munich Show I usually go on a while about how the scene, both inside the halls where the show is held and downtown, in and around the beautiful Marienplatz, is always the same-a dignified, comforting old-world stasis, with all of the centuries looking down, mildly amused at us tourists, as yellow-brown autumn leaves fall. Well, podner, things are a whole heap different here in Tucson where, each year, in the great buzzing spaces with only low brown mountains hemming them in, many diverse things-roadways, business outlets, patches of parkland, mineral-show venues-are being constructed or de-constructed, and changefulness rules, everywhere you look. Of the five or six separate shows of primary interest to mineral collectors, just two (as of 2020) have taken on airs of something like permanence: the "Main Show," of course, with its wondrous displays, which comes at the end of the whole fantasia, and Dave Waisman's Westward Look Show, now 19 years old and still small, still attracting well-heeled collectors (and everyone else who likes to look at fine minerals).