Riker mounts and display frames

A shallow glass-topped box with a cotton bed, sold everywhere, and worth understanding before a collection goes into them.

What a Riker mount is

A flat cardboard box with a clear top and a layer of cotton batting. The specimen is laid on the cotton and the lid presses it gently into place.

Cheap, flat, displayable on a wall, and the standard housing for teaching sets and for small flat material.

What they are good for

Flat material: slabs, thin sections, small flat specimens, cut stones, arrowheads.

Display where the specimens are being shown as a set rather than individually.

Teaching and education kits, where handling is by people who should not be handling the specimens directly.

What they are bad for

Cardboard and cotton, which is to say acidic board and an organic fiber, in a closed box. Both are exactly what the acid-vapor and pest pages warn about.

Pressure. The lid holds the specimen by pressing it, which is fine for a slab and damaging for anything with delicate projecting crystals.

Cotton snagging. Fine crystals and acicular material catch in the fibers and break when lifted.

Light. A glass-topped display frame on a wall is a fugitive-color specimen in daylight.

If you use them

Keep them for flat, robust, non-reactive material.

Replace the cotton with an inert alternative where you can, or put an acid-free barrier between the specimen and the bed.

Not for long-term storage of anything you care about, and not for carbonates or sulfides at all.

And off the sunny wall, which is where they always end up.

References