Celestine

Item Description

A wonderful and highly aesthetic piece from the Holloway Quarry in Michigan featuring a pair of "sword"-shaped, gemmy/translucent, pale bluish-silvery colored tabular crystals of Celestine measuring up to 8.2 cm, dramatically flaring out of limestone matrix. The main crystal is in fine condition, with no major damage, while the smaller secondary crystal has a bit of attached matrix on the termination, so it's not totally complete, but still not broken, save the base where it was detached from the pocket wall. The piece actually sits on its own without the aid of a base or clay, but you have to set it down with the smaller Celestine pressed against the surface of the display area, so I wouldn't recommend displaying it this way since Celestine is a bit brittle and has a few defined cleavage planes. Still a distinctive and showy Celestine specimen, that doesn't quite resemble most we've seen from this well-known locality. The piece was collected by Dan Edmundson.
Ex George Loud Collection No. 28.3.1.2 MI.11; 9532 George (born August 16, 1942) is a well-known mineral collector from Washington, DC and South Carolina respectively, and was a patent lawyer by trade for over 50 years. He assembled one of the great mineral collections in the U.S., comprising worldwide specimens, and in later years he sold the worldwide specimens to focus on minerals of the United States, specifically locality suites with an emphasis on amazing representation of species while still maintaining fine quality. The specimens remarkably range from micros to all the way up to large cabinets in size. We recently acquired most of his impressive 9000+ piece collection, and the VAST majority of these pieces will be offered here in the auctions, as we feel that everyone deserves and equal opportunity at acquiring these important, well-documented and fine quality specimens for their collections.
See: https://mineralogicalrecord.com/biographies_labels/george-loud for more information