You probably entered this website looking for information on a rare rock or an obscure mineral locality. In the unlikely event that you also want to know something about the person to blame for the all the errors, omissions and exaggerations, here is a brief bio. (Embarrassing events of his dissipated youth, romantic disasters, and unconventional political views have been edited out, which leaves only the boring parts to be read here.)

   Alfredo Petrov was born in England where, at the age of 11, he collected his first minerals (gypsum crystals and flint) and bought his first mineral books (an old used Dana and the British edition of Fred Pough’s field guide). He was educated in England, Ethiopia (where he graduated from high school), Beirut (“the Paris of the Middle East”), and California, where during his impoverished years as a geology student he had a part-time job in the mineral department of the San Diego Natural History Museum (which still had a mineral department in those days) – his first mineral-related job (unless you count mining bat guano in a cave to sell to gardeners as a teenage entrepreneur in Ethiopia).

   In addition to the previously mentioned countries, Alfredo has at various times lived and worked in Germany, Idaho, Washington, Mexico, Belize, Japan and, longest of all, Bolivia. He currently divides his time between homes in Peekskill (New York) and Cochabamba (Bolivia) and makes a living selling mineral specimens at shows, guiding field trips to collecting sites, translating mineralogical literature and lecturing on minerals and mining. But life is not only about work – In his free time Alfredo enjoys growing cacti, going to cinemas, reading science fiction novels, eating sushi, hiking and camping on tropical islands and corresponding with friends around the world.

   He welcomes correspondence on mineralogical topics. If you write to him in English, Spanish, German or Esperanto you will get a quick reply (unless he’s temporarily incommunicado in some remote mining camp); write in Japanese or French and you might get a tardy response after he finds his dictionaries and aspirin. Any other language will, so sorry, probably get sent to the spam filter.