Diamond Dan Publications, led by seasoned mineral collector, artist, and author Darryl Powell, has been a leader in printed and electronic mineral publications since 1991.
Our mission is to produce high-quality, fairly-priced educational materials that will help mineral collectors — particularly young mineral collectors — to be successful mineral collectors. We believe that an educated collector is a very successful collector. The more you know about minerals, mineralogy, and mineral collecting, the more you will appreciate good-quality mineral specimens; you will also be able to build a high-quality mineral collection.
In 2021 we began offering custom publications-as-a-service, crafting unique coloring books for children and adults for a variety of organizations. These books feature drawings of items, buildings, and locations that are important to the organization's mission and what they want their visitors to see and experience. Our customers include:
We also partner with individuals and organizations to move their publishing dreams through the process of writing, layout and publishing. Learn more about how we can partner together!
In 1993, my son, Aaron, was deep into Barney the Purple Dinosaur coloring books. I thought, "What the world needs is a mineral coloring book." Whether it did or not was beside the point, but I slapped one together: "Minerals to Color, A to Z." The drawings were very simple and very amateur. The text was typed out on a green screen computer and printed out. Then the pictures and text were literally taped onto pages, taken to the printer and the printer shot negatives and printed the book. (Today, of course, all our books are created with sophisticated software which produces high-quality pdf's which are then emailed to the printer.)
Much to my pleasure, and complete surprise, the books sold. As I say to my children, "And a dynasty was born!"
The name "Diamond Dan" was simply born of the need to have a "publishing company" which, honestly, didn't really exist even after the books were printed. The alliteration of “Diamond Dan” and “Publications” tagged on seemed to work. Diamond is a universally known mineral. Dan is simple. Publications is what it was about. Diamond Dan Publications was thus born. To this day customers refer to me mostly as Dan, even though my name is Darryl.
