some of the local dealers on the internet auctions now from  places
like India and the Philippines probably fit that model. I know one
dealer outside the US who is rather adventurous and  travels to places
most of us might not think of visiting and does try to get the locals
to think of supplying shells  as an enterprise of  economic
opportunity (for himself and themselves).... He may get more shells
from them down the road as a result but so far i havent seen material
from those places turning up on the market otherwise.

On 3/30/14, John Varner <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> this thread has headed off in a curatorial vein, which is OK, but I was
> originally wondering aloud if there might not be a way to unite suppliers
> like the "sea women" with buyers, (specimen collectors) more efficiently via
> the web.  I'm guessing that the Sea Women would be flabbergasted to learn
> that a single nice T. cornutus could fetch $50 - probably as much or more
> than they make off a day's diving for the fish monger.  Likewise with
> African villagers who gather and sell 6" Achatinas by the basket full for
> pennies, etc., etc.  There is a growing "Fair Trade" movement to lessen the
> cut of middlemen for commodities like coffee beans and cocao by seeing that
> the actual small-time producers get a higher percentage of the finished
> value of the product.  As the web has expanded into even remote areas, such
> a scheme - fair trade shells - seems do-able.
> Back in the 1960's, as a kid with my name in the AMU annual bulletin, I was
> written to by a leper colony in the Philippines.  They were soliciting me to
> see if I would like to buy shells, as this was a revenue source for the
> colony.  It was almost heart-wrenching.  As a kid, I was not in the market.
> But I often wonder how those people could have benefited from being able to
> directly sell on an internet auction site, had the web been around and they
> could take advantage of it.
>
> - John
>
> Date: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 21:40:33 +0000
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CONCH-L] price does not equate to rarity
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> At the Academy, we often receive the donation of a collection,and from our
> point of view "the more labels, the better". They can make a big difference
> in the long run. For example:
>  just last week we were looking at some Terebra types in the collection.
> They were from Detlev Thaanum, but had been collected by D. B. Kuhns and D.
> B. Langford - who turn out to be the same person. He changed his name in
> 1914. This was important, as the name
>  Thaanum used was Kuhns, but our cataloger (and Pilsbry, in describing the
> species) used Langford, thus helping us determine when and in what order
> things were done. Thaanum's original labels were still present (in his
> distinctive handwriting), so we knew what
>  we were looking at.
>
> Most of the lots in the Paul Hesse collection came with his neat labels, but
> also their earlier ones. This has helped us identify types from several
> authors, who sold or exchanged specimens with Hesse, going back to the 1860s
> - Rolle, Monterosato and Pfeiffer,
>  to name but three.
>
> In a collection we recently received, the owner had typed the contents of
> each original label onto one of his own, then thrown the former away. Sadly,
> over decades he had forgotten from whom he had purchased the various lots
> (several thousand), and we thus
>  lost a link to the original collectors.
>
> So, from a museum collection manager: NEVER discard a label, please, and
> number all the labels (and the shells too) so that when (not if, when) you
> drop a drawer, you can reunite everything correctly.
>
>
>
>
> Paul Callomon
>
> Collection Manager, Malacology, Invertebrate Paleontology and General
> Invertebrates
>
>
> Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia
>
> [log in to unmask] Tel 215-405-5096 - Fax 215-299-1170
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

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