Walter E. Donovan is a retired engineer who was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1950 and, as a teenager, did lots of chemical experiments, blew up lots of stuff, built three Tesla coils, a 40-KV 200-joule cockroach and wood vaporizer, and managed to keep all his appendages. In 1966, while in high school, Walter won a $1000.00 prize in a state-wide chemistry competition. Wayne received a B.A. in math in 1970 from LaSalle College, a M.S. in computer science in 1973 from the University of Illinois and worked at the university for several years on a project with the United States Department of Agriculture using satellite imagery to forecast crop production. Walt married in 1980 and moved with his wife to California where he worked for the United States Geological Survey, at the NASA Ames Research Center. He also spent several years working for Sun Microsystems and later spent 20 years working at Nvidia as a systems architect. Walt found his interest in mineral collecting in 2018 after a visit to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. He later met Wayne Tompson at the 2020 Tucson show where Walt was showing off his family collection. He and Wayne talked about writing a book someday, and Ikons is the result of their collaboration with Dr. Robert Lavinsky, Dr. Wendell E. Wilson, and Sandor P. Fuss.

Dr. Robert Lavinsky is a lifelong lover of natural beauty, and it was as a fossil collector at age 11 that he accidentally stumbled into the world of mineral shows and exhibits. That introduced him to the sport of collecting this particular facet of Nature’s Art and triggered a life-long addiction. The influence of great mentors in the Columbus, Ohio club and the book Gem & Crystal Treasures by Peter Bancroft changed his life forever. Rob speaks both Russion and Chinese which helped his growing business as Russia opened up and minerals flowed out, particularly through friends at the Fersman Mineralogical Museum of Moscow. Rob received a doctorate in genetic engineering at the University of California, but his mineral business quickly grew to become the largest of its kind on the early internet for the new art class of fine minerals and crystals during the 1990’s. After graduation, he went full time into the mineral business and never looked back. Today, irock.com and its sister website, mineralauctions.com, together host the largest private archive of mineral sales records and information online. The new mineral “Lavinskyite” was named in his honor by a NASA-affiliated laboratory in 2013, in recognition of his contributions and support oat the beginning of mindat.org in the late 1990’s, and his continuing contribution of information and donation of minerals to multiple institutions.

Dr. Wendell E. Wilson, the longtime editor of the Mineralogical Record (since 1976) began collecting minerals at the age of ten, during a vacation trip to Lake Superior. In 1969, he graduated from the University of Minnesota in Duluth with a double major in Art and Geology, and minors in physics, chemistry, and math – prefiguring his lifetime involvement in both art and miner science. He then moved on to Arizona State University near Phoenix to (1) collect at all of Arizona’s most famous mineral localities, and (2) earn a master’s degree in Mineralogy (in that order). While in Arizona, he teamed up with Wayne Thompson and various others for underground collecting at the Red Cloud, Rowley, Old Yuma, Apache, Ray, silver bill, defiance, Grandview, Magma, Harquahala, Southwest (Bisbee), Grand Reef, Glove, J.C. Holmes, Inspiration, and 79 mines. At the latter, he found what are still considered to be the world’s finest specimens of aurichalcite. Wendell earned his Ph.D. in Mineralogy at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis while also working on the first Lunar samples and writing his first article for the Mineralogical Record, which he joined as full-time editor upon graduation in 1976. Since then, Wendell has authored over 260 journal articles on minerals and mineral localities, 25 articles, and four books on mining history and collectibles (his lates book, the second edition of Antique Miners’ Candlesticks, was published in 2022), and nearly 2,000 biographies of people in the Mineralogical Record Library, and the Mineralogical Record’s “Antiquarian Reprint Series,” established to preserve history’s rarest illustrated mineralogies. The new mineral “wendwilsonite” was named in his honor in 1987 “in recognition of his contributions to mineralogy,” and the Mineralogical Record itself, under the editorship, was honored in 1982 by the naming of the new Tsumeb species, “minrecordite” for “promoting both a better knowledge of Tsumeb minerals and a more beneficial interaction between professional and amateur mineralogists.”

Sandor P. Fuss is a lifelong collector, dealer, and broker of collectibles in numerous fields including fine minerals, Himalayan art, antique Early American glass, 19th century European porcelain, and Japanese woodblock prints. Since 1986, his primary focus has been dealing with fine mineral specimens; at the age of 16, he started working in a small “rock shop” in his hometown of Chatham, Massachusetts. During his college years and until 1995, he set up as a mineral dealer at shows around New England and at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. He then got a job as the lead salesperson for Bryan Lees at Collector’s Edge Minerals in Golden, Colorado. Sandor also owns Mile High Mineral Cleaning Laboratory, LLC, which for the last 20 years has been one of the premier mineral specimen preparation labs in the world. The lab cleans, trims, repairs, and restores natural mineral specimens per the requests of the clients based on the best course of action needed to improve the specimen.

Wayne A. Thompson developed his interest in the history of the American West over a 50-year period, beginning with his fascination for minerals that he began collecting in early childhood. He expanded his interests to include collecting fossils and Native American artifacts. Today, his world-class collections contain some of the finest mineral specimens and Pueblo ceramic pottery, many of which now reside in museums and private collections all over the world. When he turned his attention to the study and collecting of masterpieces of Native American California and Arizona coiled baskets, he became a recognized expert in this area also and is often consulted by museums, collectors, dealers, and academics. He is the author of several articles and books. He currently lives in Phoenix with his wife Malee and daughter Stevia.