Yesterday I received a really nice email and, with the author’s consent, I decided to publish it on the website because this is maybe the most beautiful part of sand collecting: the people… “Hello, I’ve arrived to your website accidentaly, but I’m really excited after dive into all the beautiful information you present in. I’m a [...]

Collecting small amounts can be extremely benefical in terms of number of sands swapped. As far as I know, this is the biggest number of sands that I ever sent to another collector: 275 sands in quantities from 2 to 5 ml. I really hope the package will arrive at destination because it took me [...]

The last 22 sands were sent by Pete Gigliotti and they have just been entered into World Atlas of Sands database. Among them there are samples from 10 different states in the US (8 sands from Hawaii only, including the famous green olivine sand from Papakolea beach) and one sand from each British and US [...]

Last night I took some photos of the sands sent by Kathy Obersinner. There are really nice sands, with lots of minerals of different colors. The samples are maily from Alaska and Hawaii but also from California, Florida, Oregon, Illinois, Chicago, Mississippi, Washington. Additionally, several sands from New Zealand, Mexico, Canada and Bahamas. I already [...]

The winter months are rather bad time for sand collecting, at least in this part of the world. However, one can use the time spent at home to organise and refresh the collection, eventually better organize the trading list etc. Some time ago I received a very kind email from another sand collector in the [...]

Very often I was annoyed of not having a complete and updated tradelist so this weekend I started to count all leftovers for the first 1,000 samples. I was surprised to see that one third (336 samples) could potentially be swapped although most of them are in very small amounts (see graphic below). I will [...]

We met Diotima and Bernard for the first time last year in September at the 7th German sand meeting in Black Forest. I think they are the most cheerful and open-minded people we ever met among sand collectors. It was a honor to meet them and we enjoyed a lot sharing the evening in the [...]

Last weekend we joined the 7th German Sand Meeting in Lauterbach, Black Forest area. It was the first time we took part in such an event and we will never regret it. For long time we didn’t decide whether to go or not since it supposed to drive about 700 km way and back but [...]

Today an old dream became reality: the World Atlas of Sands came into life in printed form!!! The book is simply called “World Atlas of Sands” and it has the suffix “Vol. 1″ because it is part of a series of more volumes with the topic SAND. This first book is just a compilation of [...]

Today I just ordered a new book about beaches of the world after I saw a review note on Michael Welland‘s great website. The book is called “The World’s Beaches: A Global Guide to the Science of the Shorelines” and, as I couldn’t find it on the Amazon.de, I ordered it from the US store [...]