Recollections of mineral collecting and dealing in India

He was struck, I presumed, by my specimens of green apophyllite from Pashan. Those, and some sparkling mesolite sun-bursts, were the eye-catchers in what I had spread out, even though some of the best ones had already been picked out in Cambridge by the Harvard Museum.

"Now, where's that powellite specimen you talked about over the phone? Did Harvard get that too?"

"No, Dick." I reached into a box to get the specimen. "I put a price tag of $1000 on it, as you suggested. But Cliff thought that was outrageously high. He said only a doddering old lady, with more money than brains, would buy it at that price." I handed the powellite specimen to Bideaux. He had already told me weeks ago, when I returned to Cambridge from India, that if my verbal description of the piece over the phone was anywhere near accurate, then this was by a long way the choicest powellite specimen ever to have been discovered.

"You're absolutely positive this is powellite, and not scheelite?" Bideaux examined the 6.5 cm specimen intently. It contained pyramidal, striated, pale greenish honey-colored transparent crystals of powellite in parallel growth, perched on pink psuedocubic apophyllite crystals. (The circumstances surrounding the acquisition of this astonishing specimen, and the hunt for its source, have already been described in Kothavala, R. Z., 1982, "The Discovery of Powellite at Nasik, India," Mineralogical Record, 13 (5), p. 303309).

"Yes, the X-ray identification was done at Harvard by Dave Cook. That fit with the optical study I performed myself. It's powellite, no doubt about that."

"And Harvard passed it up! Well, Rusty, this is so superior to any known powellite that I wouldn't hesitate to raise the price to $1,500, or more!"

When Bideaux turned the subject to the people and politics of the mineral world, I saw that my pricing tutorial was over. One after another he ticked off several key players-curators, collectors, dealers-and described the circumstances that made them so. Among dealers, one personality, and Dick's tale of how this dealer came by his flamboyant reputation, left me with an indelible impression. David P. Wilber, or just plain Dave. I had already heard the name mentioned several times, even on the East Coast. He was a fairly young man, who was already widely known across America.

Bideaux told me that Wilber had once spotted a morganite beryl specimen that struck him as being the best one in existence. The owner wouldn't put a price on it, so Wilber made the man an offer of exchange, one which Wilber's associates and friends thought was way too high. But the man turned it down. After some months, Wilber hunted up the owner again, and offered an exchange worth almost twice as much. Again the offer was shunned, and again Wilber's colleagues thought he had lost his moorings for making such an absurdly high offer. Still obsessed with acquiring that specimen, Wilber, I was told, tried a third time with an offer that was simply astronomical by the standards then prevailing. This time the owner melted. And Wilber got the specimen. His associates' derisive chuckles and guffaws followed Wilber like a vapor trail everywhere he went.