One of our favourite things here at Turtleduck Press is the oddball, the unusual, the out-of-the-ordinary. Give us an arcane fact or something cool about the universe, and we’re happy.
(Which is why we’re looking for oddball novels. But I digress.)
I’ve just come back from a road trip through Western Canada. We poked into lots of wonderful shops that I wanted to buy in their entirety — yarn shops, indie designer clothing stores, art and photography stores, independent bookstores — but the best one by far was the rocks and gems store in Banff, Alberta.
Picture a store packed to the brim with unusual stones, fossils, petrified wood. Jewelry made of everything from meteorites to ammonites. A petrified wood tabletop. Stone sculptures. Rock crystal. A real mammoth tusk. Geodes of all sizes, from an inch to several feet long.
It’s practically a museum of geology and paleontology.
But at the same time, they have stuff for all price ranges, from $2 (pretty stones) to $20 (small trilobites) to $2,000 and above (rare fossils). I tell you, they know how to work a gateway drug. Lure a kid in with a $6 necklace, and 20 years later she’ll be back buying a $60 ammonite. We spent four hours there one day, continued on our road trip, stopped again on our way back, and spent another three hours, and a good chunk of cash besides.
I’ve long been interested in dinosaurs, and I even found a piece of petrified wood once. I didn’t know I was quite that interested in rocks…but it turns out they’re fascinating too.
My favourite items? Besides the whole entire store?
- ammonites turned to shiny iron in the process of fossilization, resulting in something out of steampunk
- necklaces made of labradorite, a blue or clear stone that changes color as you tilt it and seems to glow from within (like moonstone, but with more color)
- an iridescent substance called ammolite, a semiprecious stone that comes from ammonites and is found only in the Rocky Mountains
- necklaces where the stone isn’t polished within an inch of its life, but still has some rougher edges
All I can say is that it’s a good thing I don’t live closer!
Oh man…we have the Gem and Mineral show here every year, and I don’t go because I’d probably spend my rent. In Sedona the crystal shops were most dangerous to me. I do not need more rocks! (I always need more rocks.)