Best place to spend time just looking through "stuff" was Leo Hakola's Trade Beads of the Old West room at the Howard Johnson's show.

Truly one of the most authentic experiences one could have in Tucson is to find yourself in "Leo Zone". It was a joy to meet him, and I hope he comes back next year!

Judy, I didn't bring my camera this year, and I had David do images of some of my finds - but this image borrowed from Jamey must be shown.

Alan has for many years been a virtuoso grinder of rosetta (chevron) cane. This necklace is of beads that Alan ground from 1920s red rosetta cane. As
Art Seymour says, "Alan opens up a cane like no one else." For sure and for certain!

yes thank you all. I seemed to have missed Joyce's and Rosanna's thread which disappeared on the 2nd page by now. Great there is a search button!!! I'm sorry this year didn't go flueless for some of you and hope it's just a small bad memory amongst heaps of bead memories.

I wondered if you found any major changes compared to Tucson 2015: bead wise (like the Indonesian Venetians, they could fool me), price wise , anything becoming scarser than before?

It's so hard to generalize when talking price and availability for collectible beads. I would say that for the short time I spent at the shows, as compared to last year, it seemed that the African traders have less and less new stock to offer in the fancy Venetian bead department, and the prices are very high. They have mountains of the more common trade beads, along side mountains of new stock from Africa and China, mainly.
Over in the Ethnography Room at the Grant show, most everything was at the museum- quality top end, and prices were very high, IMHO. Special beads could be found for the most picky of collectors which was very nice.
Average prices with a few bargains were found at Leo's room, but the really rare beads were also priced accordingly there. I don't think anyone shows up to sell at Tucson without a firm understanding of "current market conditions".
I would say that there were no surprises- there are a lot of beads to see in Tucson that you are unlikely to find anywhere else unless you are very patient and spent many hundreds of hours on line. There are a LOT of low to medium quality offerings for decent enough prices but these can usually be found on places like eBay, so no real reason to travel to Tucson to find them.
As usual I had a shopping list of hard to find beads that I want for specific necklace designs. I found a number of them in the Ethnography Room, so I was happy but none of them were cheap!
Just to give an idea about top end prices- that strand of light blue fancy King beads shown earlier was $2500. At least that was the asking price.

I have met a lot of people, had lots of fun, then spent most of my time in bed......
Actually bought very few beads, and also did not ask too many prices.
Everything that was scarce last year, is scarcer now. The numbers of new beads in the African village are very high. Including lots of Czech (and maybe Chinese) seed beads strung on raffia.

It was a treat to see Bernie's beads, but I'm sure they were priced to market value. A lot of the old Czech beads are still quite affordable. Maybe it is time for a new appreciation of these!