Sixty-Dollar Orthoceras Enters Display Case, Immediately Tops Cabinet's All-Time Value List By Receipt

The orthoceras arrived at the Tri-County Lapidary Society's display case on a Tuesday, in a paper sack, and by the society's own valuation procedure it is now the most valuable specimen the cabinet has ever held, a distinction it earned entirely at a yard sale for sixty dollars while standing next to a jar of gravel.

The procedure is written, it has never been amended, and it is the reason nobody is arguing about the procedure. Valuation is by receipt. Not by appraised worth, not by specimen quality, and certainly not by the sentence which begins, in a tone this column has heard four times this month, "that piece is worth far more than I paid for it." The receipt is the number. The number goes on the card. The card goes on the rail.

Registrar Grace Mitchell, who maintains the rail, did not soften this. "We have had the rule since the case was built," she said, sorting a folder that contains, among other things, an eleven-dollar amethyst and a prehnite whose owner has requested the folder be kept closed in public. "A receipt is a document. Everything else is a member telling me about a member."

What the rule did, in practice, was demote an entire era. The cabinet has been run for two years by a quartz cluster, displayed at the back on a riser of its own, acquired in 1998 by Eric McDonald for a sum he describes as negligible and cannot document. The society resolved that undocumented legacy specimens would be carried at a standing figure of one dollar, and the cluster, at one dollar, was for a time the tallest number in the case. It held the position through two show seasons and one re-gluing.

Sixty dollars has ended that. The card behind the cluster now reads, in the wording Registrar Mitchell applied without comment, background.

"I have not made a campaign," said McDonald, who has printed a page of comparables and carries it in a folder he does not call a campaign folder. "I am simply pointing out that value and price are not the same word, and that the case is now telling visitors that a slab of Moroccan shale outranks a cluster that members have asked to photograph for two years."

The shale in question is a fine orthoceras, black and straight, with the chambered suture visible along one weathered edge, bought at a yard sale by Kristen Green, who supplied the receipt without being asked for it and, when the number posted, said only that she had hoped it would sit in the middle where nobody looks.

Michelle Murray, who chairs the display committee, has begun what she calls a review, which so far consists of asking whether the rail should show two columns. The committee meets Thursday.

The quartz cluster that ran the case for two years is now listed as background.