RICHARD W. BARSTOW ARCHIVE
http://barstow.mindat.org,
INFORMATION
Richard William Barstow (1947–1982), known universally as Dick, was born in Bangor, north Wales on 7th January 1947. He was brought up in Caernarvonshire, and was later educated at Selsdon Grammar School, Dick joined an insurance company, but the job didn’t suit him and he left to look for work in Cornwall during the mining revival of the 1960s. He worked for a time in the sampling office of South Crofty mine, and subsequently in the same capacity at Geevor mine.
He was the most enterprising of the modern-day field collectors in Britain, and a formidable mineralogist. Trading by mail order from his home in Tregeseal, near Botallack, Cornwall, he began his mineral business in December 1972, later moving to Drakewalls House, Gunnislake in 1978.
Energetic and thorough, in everything that he did, he researched and visited many classic and recent localities and was remarkably successful in recovering good specimens. His hall-mark green card labels are still to be seen at mineral shows and on the Internet, together with the less-common white labels which accompany specimens from his personal collection.
His monthly lists were very good, always containing something affordable and worth having, and his descriptions very accurate.
Whilst not an academic, or scientifically educated collector, Dick was extremely knowledgeable and highly respected within mineralogical circles. Sadly he died at the young age of 35, from liver cancer. In 1986 the Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery purchased a portion of his fine private collection of Cornish and Devonshire minerals.
This archive contains a more-or less complete set of his monthly lists. Some of the lists are in poor condition, and others have not reproduced well. If you are able to provide better scanned copies of any of the lists, please contact the webmaster. I would like to acknowledge help received from Richard Hotston, Nick Sleep, and Nick Carruth who assisted in this project by lending copies of lists not in my possession.
Roy Starkey
March 2010
For additional information about Dick see: Starkey, R.E., & Cooper, M.P. (2010) Richard W. Barstow - Mineral Dealer Extraordinaire. UK Journal of Mines & Minerals 31, 7-57.
DOWNLOAD INFORMATION
Please note this is a work in progress, if you have copies of missing lists or missing pages please contact the webmaster. You can download each month individually or Full for the full year of lists, or HQ for the full year in a higher quality (much larger file size). The final column shows what £1 in that particular year would approximately be worth in 2010 pounds sterling, so for 1973 prices, multiply prices listed in price lists by 9.4 to get a basic idea of the equivalent price these days.
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Webpage created and managed by Jolyon Ralph, mindat.org