About Fritz Schreiber
Fritz Schreiber was born in 1947 in Schwechat near Vienna, where he lived all his life. He was married and had a son, through whom he came to collecting. He also spent large parts of his working life in Schwechat, where he was responsible for all technical matters at the local Körnerhalle. He retired in 2007 and had time for his hobbies. Collecting minerals took a central place among them, together with a great love of orchids.
His particular love was the Lavrion area in Greece – not only the minerals in the old galleries and on the dumps, but also the many different slag minerals along the Mediterranean coast. Fritz spent many weeks of the year with his wife Inge in this second home, where they liked to be with Greek friends. Friends from home visited them there, went out collecting with Fritz and benefited from his profound knowledge of the ancient labyrinths of galleries.
Besides the Lavrion minerals, he was also interested in slag minerals from other sources and in micromounts in general – provided that they matched his aesthetic ideas.
Besides the pleasure of the minerals themselves, he valued the contacts with friends and like-minded people that came from collecting. This sociability also showed in the annual micromounter swap day that Fritz organised in Schwechat. He was in constant contact not only with his collector friends but also with scientists devoted to mineralogy; here the cooperation with the Natural History Museum in Vienna deserves special mention.
In his later years he increasingly began to document his micromounts photographically as well. Like many mineral collectors, Fritz sometimes had trouble deciding whether to photograph minerals or orchids.