Silver on Acanthite on Calcite, Ex. Clarence Bement, AMNH, Herb Obodda

Item Description

This specimen is part of the 2020 Dallas Mineral Collecting Symposium benefit auction, with proceeds benefiting Mineralogical Record, Rocks & Minerals, Tucson Gem and Mineral Society, and mindat.org. Thanks to all of our participants!

Billing for this auction will occur on Monday, August 24, for payment using PayPal or credit card. Shipping will be billed at cost, or please contact brandy@mineralauctions.com if you'd like to plan on picking up items at future shows or during a stop through Dallas.

Click here for a video of this specimen!

   St. Andreasberg silvers on matrix are profoundly rare today, and this specimen consists of rich nests of silver wires, curled up in a pocket of crystallized calcite of the typical Andreasberg crystal habit. It is actually a very beautiful piece, for a large matrix old silver like this, and the wires are rich and bright. They sit on sharp crystals of acanthite to 4 or 5 mm, that you can see through the wire nests. Overall, it is a display-quality cabinet piece, unique because the silver is on such nice white matrix instead of on massive ore. If you look under the calcite, though, there are layers of massive and banded ore, and it is by weight clearly very rich in silver, so it is interesting from the historic geology perspective as well (and massive, at 656 grams weight!).

   Long story to this one! It was in the collection of Clarence Bement, and then went to the American Museum in NYC, in 1910, when JP Morgan (yes, THAT Morgan!) purchased the Bement collection and donated it. It left the museum in an exchange to Herb in the 1970s and he sold it to Mary and Gardner Miller, the famous calcite collectors from Missoula, Montana, as a very nice large matrix Andreasberg calcite with incidental silver on it! over 20 years later in the late 1990s, Herb bought the Miller calcite collection for what seemed like the time an inordinate amount of money for "just calcites" and sold it in nearly its entirety to a single collector.

   However, he pulled some German pieces to keep for himself (and this appealed for the complex matrix hosting the silver, for Herb's large suite of German silver species) as a memento, including this one. When I bought Herb's collection in 2008, I got this passed on to me, trimmed down from a large calcite plate with silver bits in the middle, to transform it to a matrix silver specimen centered on the silver pocket of curlicue wires. A really interesting, historic, heavy specimen from ancient Germany, this was valued at $5500.

Donated by Rob Lavinsky with Herb and Monika Obodda.