Abstract
O, the power of the pen. With just one strange plot twist in his 1829 bestseller, “Anne of Geierstein,” Sir Walter Scott destroyed the European opal market for nearly 50 years. And he did it just by having a character falsely accused of being a demoness die shortly after a chance drop of holy water fell on her opal and quenched its mysterious, fiery color. Convinced Scott was warning them that wearing opal could bring bad luck, suggestible readers stopped buying the gem. Within a matter of months, the opal market had crashed and prices were down more than 50%.
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© 1990 Modern Jeweler Magazine
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Federman, D. (1990). Australian Black Opal. In: Modern Jeweler’s Consumer Guide to Colored Gemstones. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6488-7_30
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-6488-7_30
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4684-6490-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4684-6488-7
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