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.”