Rhodochrosite

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Do I Have a Favorite Species?

“I can’t really say I have a favorite species. I guess I’m more interested in mineral systems than individual minerals, so call me a locality collector. I like igneous processes, so such things as S-type pegmatites (they have the best and biggest gem crystals) and hydrothermal ore deposits attract me more than sedimentary or metamorphic environments. I’d like to focus on the Tongbei pegmatite locality in China; it is geologically fascinating, and I think it deserves to be considered a world-class district such as the Colorado smoky quartz and amazonite localities. In part it’s because that’s where I collected when I was starting out, but maybe it’s more because the specimens of bright orange spessartine on black smoky quartz that drew me there in the first place are so appealing. I was shocked when I first came to the United States and got to see Lavinsky’s personal collection, which includes Tongbei specimens I had never seen in China with rhodochrosite and other unusual species associated with the spessartine.

During the summers of 2020 and 2021 I volunteered as a photographer for Arkenstone in Dallas and got to know this collection better (owner Lavinsky says he corrected several location attribution mistakes) and fell in love with a magnificent specimen of spessartine on smoky quartz. I had heard that Lavinsky never sells things out of his personal collection, but nonetheless I insisted that if he ever decided to sell a special Tongbei combination specimen, I was interested, no matter what it cost. I repeated the comment at the beginning of the summer of 2021, and Lavinsky said if we had a pro- ductive summer he would give it to me. I was surprised when he handed it to me on my twentieth birthday (16 June, well before the end of summer) and looked at it with new eyes knowing it was now mine—and realized that he had lived up to not selling things from his personal collection."

Peter K. M. Megaw (2024) Up and Coming Mineral Collector Jingnan “Tom” Zhang: One to Watch, Rocks & Minerals, 99:2, 160-171, DOI: 10.1080/00357529.2024.2279464