Business is booming, and bidding wars and backroom deals have taken over the wildly popular Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.
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.
Arkenstone has been pitching minerals as “nature’s art,” in an attempt to broaden the market for expensive rocks from a small cohort of enthusiasts to a wider swath of the wealthy. The hype has caused some grumbling among the more old-school parts of the mineral world. Prices have gone up, and many excellent specimens are being bought by people who don’t know, or care, about their purchase’s chemical composition. “It’s not so much about the minerals,” Ralph said.
Many of the dealers at the Tucson shows work out of hotel rooms, setting up their displays between the bed and the bathroom, which makes for an oddly intimate atmosphere. At one of the lower-rent events, in a motel near the highway, I wandered through fluorescent-lit hallways that smelled of old smoke and peered into rooms where venders had laid out their glittering displays. It felt seedy and secretive, not entirely in a bad way.
Between customers, he showed me a recent acquisition, a purple cube of Illinois fluorite. “I bought that off Rob Lavinsky. It was one of his first significant rocks—he bought it with his bar-mitzvah money,” Thompson said. “Look at that. That’s the rock that turned into an empire.”
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