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| Best of Photographers |
Mick COOPER
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Michael ("Mick") Cooper has been a collector of minerals and mineralogical ephemera for 40 odd (40, odd) years. He was introduced to the wonders of crystals on the steps of his school library by a childhood friend who showed him some cleavages of calcite and galena he had picked up in Derbyshire. After studying chemistry, he worked in dyestuffs and microbiology laboratories for several years, latterly responsible for a
laboratory-scale sewage farm testing effluent biodegradability. (Luckily the basic material
was beef extract rather than proper sewage.)
In the 1970s a complete change of career found him in Manchester in a small and destitute private art gallery selling prints and pottery. This was dramatically cut short by illness and he returned to Nottingham to convalesce where, after stints as this and that (photojournalist, crossword setter, pop festival security guard, etc.), he became a collections cataloguer in the Nottingham natural history museum.
His first forays into writing came in the 1980s. The Caldbeck Fells in Cumberland, long his favourite collecting ground, were the subject of a planned article for the Mineralogical Record. Hooking up with Chris Stanley of what was then the British Museum (Natural History) stimulated the work even more and it eventually outgrew its humble origins to become Minerals of the English Lake District: Caldbeck Fells published by the museum in 1990 to international acclaim. From 1988 to 1994 he was an editor, designer and photographer for the UK Journal of Mines and Minerals. He has illustrated several major topographical mineralogies: Wales (National Museum of Wales,1994), Långban (National Museum of Sweden, 1999), and the soon-to-be published Minerals of Scotland (Royal Museum of Scotland, 2002?).
He became Registrar and IT Manager for Nottingham City Museums and Galleries in 1992. The same year he was appointed European Correspondent for the Mineralogical Record, later becoming an Associate Editor.
His mineralogical interests are now more focussed on the history of collecting than on acquisition for his own collection. He has published large biographical articles on the mineral dealers Bryce McMurdo Wright Senior and Junior and Henry Heuland, and has completed a compendium of British dealers from 1750 to 1950 which (with luck!) will be published by Matrix Publishing in the not too distant future. His biography of the Victorian collector, con-man and gold miner John Calvert is to be published in Australia in 2002. He has contributed articles on mineral collectors and Stevens natural history auctioneers to the New Dictionary of National Biography.
In his spare time he is restoring the 200-year-old mineral collection of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and plays ragtime guitar. Though not at the same time.
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Mick Cooper on an early quartz
prospecting trip.
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| Last update 09.03.2002 |
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