Gems, minerals, and fossils on display in a tent at a hotel show.
The New Yorker has a story about the annual Tuscon Gem and Mineral Show. The show has been held each winter since 1955. If you can't find it there, you can't find it anywhere!
For a few weeks every winter, Tucson briefly goes rock crazy. In 1955, local gem-and-mineral enthusiasts began hosting a get-together, an event that’s since become something much more commercial, and much more overwhelming. This year, there were forty shows throughout the city, each of them a mazelike complex of dozens or hundreds of venders, drawing tens of thousands of visitors in total. Browsing one afternoon, I saw available for purchase a bathtub made of quartz, a case of onyx obelisks, an uncut twenty-two-carat diamond, a pendant made from a meteorite, a fossilized dinosaur tooth, and a daunting number of beads. A ubiquitous ad on the radio had an even more tantalizing proposition: “Do you want to take a picture with a baby goat inside a giant geode?”
North of downtown, mineral dealers from around the world have taken over a complex of storage units, storefronts, and showrooms. “We nicknamed it Mineral Mile,” Jolyon Ralph said. Ralph, a genial, well-connected Londoner, runs Mindat.org, a mineral-education Web site. The Mineral Mile dealers focus on rocks in their raw, or raw-ish state. (A gem is a mineral that’s been cut, polished, and faceted; not all minerals are suited to become gems—some are too opaque, or too soft—and many are more valuable in their uncut crystal form than if they’d been turned into gems.) Mineral collecting has gone through several eras. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European royalty amassed rare specimens as evidence of imperial reach and wealth. A hundred years ago, industrial titans did the same; J. P. Morgan, who donated much of his collection to New York’s Museum of Natural History, has a form of pink beryl named for him. In the nineteen-fifties, as the atomic era spurred a new interest in Earth science, rock collecting became more democratized. Many of the rock hounds I met in Tucson traced their fascination back to their uncle’s or grandfather’s rock collection. (The hobby is persistently and overwhelmingly male.)
