A Gift For Polydektes

Shutty's One Coin is Never Enough

2012-01-23T22:48:00.000-05:00

Michael S. Shutty Jr., One Coin is Never Enough. Paperback, 251 pages, $25.

In this book Shutty discusses his collecting practices (Buffalo nickels and large cents). Shutty is a psychologist and he explains various experts' psychological theories of collecting. He is fond of breaking the collecting experience into the various categories used by psychologists, producing transition diagrams such as one which purport to show collectors cycling from "Courtship" to "Hunting" to "Acquisition" to "Integration" and later to a post-collecting "Displacement" phase.

I was hoping for stories of great successful and unsuccessful collectors modeled after Nicholas A. Basbanes' descriptions of book collectors in A Gentle Madness. These are not to be found; Shutty almost exclusively discusses himself and his personal collection. Even when discussing Sheldon large cent varieties Shutty doesn't reveal that Sheldon's coin addiction left behind a trail of thefts that destroyed the legacy of the once-respected psychology professor -- a story so delicious I couldn't resist linking to it in this micro review.

I felt like Shutty spent a lot of time explaining coin collecting, perhaps targeting his explanations to his psychologist colleagues.

The first 14 chapters use examples exclusively from American coin collecting. World coin collecting is given a chapter. Ancient coins are not discussed, nor the collecting of historical medals.

I found the book interesting but not as interesting as a books on coins. I don't know if that says something about me or something about Shutty's book. There is a lot to be said for Shutty's attempts to map aspects of coin collecting upon multiple psychological theories rather than selecting one framework and attempting to pigeonhole all of collecting upon it. Still, sometimes Shutty's explanations seems overly complex.

We collect simply because we like coins more than other people. Even Shutty's favorite example, a Chain Cent slug he paid $1000 for, was purchased because it seemed like a good deal to Shutty. The simplest theory I know to explain why Shutty and I enjoy our coins is that the side-by-side comparisons we do while looking for coins somehow make us vastly more appreciative of them. Psychologist Seth Roberts calls this the Willat effect. Roberts believes connoisseurs are made this way, at least in food and drink domains such as wine via wine tastings. What I've noticed is that the same thing happens visually with coins. What really got me collecting again after a 20 year break was looking at several hundred hemidrachms of Parion over three months on eBay trying to find the most beautiful $50 example. After that I was hooked.

A Greek obol modified in antiquity

2012-01-03T20:20:00.000-05:00

This tiny obol of ancient Kelenderis (8.5mm in diameter, 0.77g) has a form of ancient damage that I have not seen before. First, the reverse. There are three raised dots on the wing. I had originally thought they were a decorative and part of the die but now am starting to believe they are a counterstamp or banker's mark (or three counterstamps/marks?). The dots are nearly the same size as the decorative dots bordering the incuse square.

Directly opposite the three dots on the wing is the forehead and right eye which are a bit flattened. I believe it was flattened by the application of the dots.

There are extensive incuse dots within the mouth. It is possible the dots are always within a line of three. There are also clearly a line of dots below the chin on the left side.

A colleague believes there is tooling or bankers marks up in the hair and to the side of the head as well. I am less certain of this, it could just be something with corrosion although the coin is of excellent metal.

A typical example, without the marks, was sold as CNG e-auction 214, lot 203. I am very interested in hearing from other collectors and institutions owning Kelenderis coins carrying similar marks or with other coins from these dies. If any readers wish to inspect the coin in person I'll be at NYINC on Saturday.

"Fighting illicit traffic of cultural property in South-East Europe"

2011-11-04T10:25:00.000-04:00

A 16 minute documentary video by Anthony Krause and Matteo Rosati. It was produced by UNESCO's Venice office. Coins are briefly shown being repatriated to Bulgaria (from Canada) at 12:30. Coins are shown being repatriated to Turkey (from Serbia) at 12:50. Coins also appear for a few seconds at 3:30 but are not discussed.

New Unicode 6.0 Money symbols

2011-11-04T09:41:00.000-04:00

The Unicode standard has some new currency and banking symbols.

1F4B0 💰 Money Bag
1F4B2 💲 Heavy Dollar Sign
1F4B3 💳 Credit Card
1F4B8 💸 Money with wings (!)
1F4B4 💴 Banknote with Yen Sign
1F4B5 💵 Banknote with Dollar Sign
1F4B6 💶 Banknote with Euro Sign
1F4B7 💷 Banknote with Pound Sign

1F3E6 🏦 Bank
1F3E7 🏧 Automated Teller Machine
1F4B1 💱 Currency Exchange (Glyph can show various coins and notes)
1F4B9 💹 Chart with upwards trend and Yen Sign

I can't see these symbols in my browser because I lack a font that includes them.

The characters were added because they were needed to render the Emoji characters used for emoticons and shopping glyphs on Japanese cell phones, not as an aid to numismatists.

The flying wad of money is my favorite. If anyone knows how this symbol is typically used in Japanese cell phone signage I would love to know! Many of the other Emoji symbols are even stranger: space aliens, Japanese ogres, someone getting a face massage, a cat that's crying, even a “Moon Viewing Ceremony”.

Ilya Prokopov on coin forgery

2011-10-12T19:15:00.003-04:00

New introduction to coin forgery by Ilya Prokopov: “The World of Coin Forgery - Part 1”.

Prokopov's books can be purchased from SP-P Publishing House.

The solidus mark

2011-10-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

The solidus was a Roman coin but it is also the name for a punctuation symbol that looks exactly like a slash. The Wikipedia article explains that '2 pounds, 10 shillings, and 6 pence' was written as £2 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 6 (as an alternative to '£2 10s. 6d.') and '10 shillings' would often be written as 10 ⁄ -.

The / has the form it does because it is an abbreviation for ∫ “Long S” sometimes known as the integral symbol. It is also called a shilling mark.

So we have a single-stroke symbol that is an textual abbreviation for another single-stroke symbol. The abbreviation has two names, both derived from denominations of coins.

Badly tooled Kushan coin

2011-09-24T19:38:00.001-04:00

I usually avoid tooled coins but this Kushan coin is one of my favorites. I really like the three-fingered Santa Claus but not as much as as the goggle-eyed horse rider. I see this piece more as the equivalent of a hobo nickel than as a damaged ancient coin.

NAC auction import guarentee

2011-09-06T09:34:00.002-04:00

Many collectors are looking with amazement at the catalog for the upcoming part 1 of the RBW collection. The catalog can be downloaded in three parts from Numismatica Ars Classica.

Numismatica Ars Classica is offering an import guarentee to US customers. This is the first guarentee of this type that I have seen, but I expect such guarentees to be increasingly important. Here is the guarentee:

The RBW Collection is an American collection and all of the coins that make up this collection were outside Italian territory prior to 19th January 2011. Furthermore, almost every item was exported from the United States using a special procedure: Certificate of Registration (CBP Form 4455), which proves American provenance,
therefore none of the coins offered in this sale are subject to any kind of US
import restrictions.

Nonetheless, Numismatica Ars Classica NAC AG endeavours to provide its American clients with the best service possible and we will therefore take it upon ourselves to carry out all of the customs formalities for importation into the USA and will then ship the lots to each individual client from within the United States.

NAC guarantees importation to the US of any coins purchased in this sale.

Blank copies of “Form 4455” can be downloaded from the US Customs web site.

I was previously unaware of this procedure. Has anyone tried it? Could I take my collection to Toronto for a long weekend to prove its provenance for the future?

3D scanning of ancient coins

2011-09-03T20:33:00.001-04:00

I recently became aware of a paper on 3D scanning of ancient coins delivered two years ago at the 22nd CIPA Symposium. The paper, by M. Kampel of the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group at the Vienna University of Technology along with S. Zambaninia, M. Schlapke, and B. Breuckmann, is available online.

The group scanned 16 ancient Roman coins and 9 medieval coins using a 3D surface scanner. They produced 3d models of the coins that look quite good! I would be curious to know how long it takes to scan a coin.

I have mentioned Martin Kampel's work before. He worked on automatic classification of ancient coins for the European Union's COINS project. This new research was partly paid for by the same European Union grant that underwrote COINs.

I would also be curious to know if a commercial service could scan my collection for a fee. This technology, if commercialized, could benefit collectors who are often obligated for insurance reasons to keep their coins in a safety deposit box at the local bank.

Hilary Clinton's comments at MOU signing

2011-08-26T11:50:00.003-04:00

This English-language TV coverage is from New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television.

Illegal export of old coins

2011-08-26T11:14:00.002-04:00

In this case, pre-2004 cupronickel 1 peso coins of the Philipines. According to a story in the Manila Standard by Roderick T. dela Cruz, “In 2006 it even discovered that an international syndicate was smuggling out the copper one-peso coins”. The central bank switched to nickel-plated steel.

The purpose of dela Cruz's story is to urge citizens to spend their old coins to relieve the Philipine Central Bank the burden of minting new ones. “The central bank always loses when minting coins with a face value lower than five pesos because the average cost of minting them is two pesos per coin.”

Amazingly, not only is the Philipine Central Bank minting 1 peso coins at an expense of 2 pesos, it is also minting 1, 5, 10, and 25 centavo coins, although one web page suggests the 1 centavo coins cannot be found and the 5 centavo coins are mostly used as decorations. A peso is worth 2.4 US cents; 25 centavos would be 0.6 US cents.

Outrageous shipping and handling fee

2011-08-23T11:16:00.003-04:00

One topic that is ever-popular in online discussion groups is outrageous shipping and handling fees. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon recently described a transaction in which the shipping and handling fees alone are expected to be $400,000,00.

Hugo Chávez intends to ship 211 tons of physical gold from London to Caracas Venezuala. The bullion value is $12,300,000,000. Shipping and insurance will not be cheap.

... my gut feeling is that Venezuela would be do well to get away with paying 3.3% of the total value of the gold in total expenses...

Always look at the shipping fees before purchasing, Dictator Chávez.

Prospero Collection

2011-08-07T21:14:00.003-04:00

Next year Baldwin's will auction The Prospero Collection. Baldwin's site doesn't yet have the catalog but it does have a 19 page Flash animated brochure featuring many rarities including an Alexander the Great Poros dekadrachm and the unique Abydos gold stater (?) shown here.

If I had time I would “review” the brochure website, which uses a strange Flash viewer with lots of scrolling and zooming. Try it.

Welcome Celator Readers

2011-08-05T06:57:00.003-04:00

Welcome readers who are discovering this blog because of Kevin Barry and Zach Beasley's “The Internet Connection” column in The Celator.

Other blogs mentioned were Ancient Coins, Ancient Coin Cleaning and Restoration, and Vox Populi.

I haven't been posting much lately but last month I received Martin Huth's gigantic new book Coinage of the Caravan Kingdoms and hope to blog upon it soon.

Why is the dollar coin unpopular?

2011-08-02T10:00:00.002-04:00

The editors of The Economist report on a psychological study by Princeton psychology professors Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer on the percieved value of coins and notes. (The article is 3 years old).

People offered the banknote believed, on average, that they could use it to buy 83 paperclips, 72 napkins or 46 sweets. Those offered the [dollar] coin thought 39 paperclips, 51 napkins or 27 sweets. In other words, the note was believed to be almost twice as valuable as the coin.

The problem with the coin is not it coin-ness, but unfamiliarity — a similar study show people undervaluing the $2 bill.

I would expect this effect to also manifest as countries change their currency, both today and in historical times.

Keyboard with new Rupee symbol

2011-07-29T20:54:00.002-04:00

We have previously blogged about the new Rupee symbol.

Indian Express.com reported today that Lenovo India is the first manufacturer with a Rupee-ready keyboard.

New US platinum coin denomination?

2011-07-28T20:49:00.002-04:00

Is the mint preparing a new US coin denomination? A law professor at Yale suggests minting two $1,000,000,000,000 coins to cover our national obligations if the debt ceiling is not raised.

CoinForgeryEbay

2011-07-14T09:14:00.002-04:00

Flickr user CoinForgeryEbay has posted 1700 photos of fake coins on eBay, including this Chinese coin in fake PCGS holder.

I haven't seen ancient coins in CoinForgeryEbay's stream.

Shastri’s Introduction To Indian Coin Forgeries

2011-07-12T10:29:00.002-04:00

Shastri JC Philip’s eBook Shastri’s Introduction To Indian Coin Forgeries (2nd edition) is available for free under a Creative Commons license at IndianCoins.Org. 26 pages. Covers ancient Indian coins through modern coins. Includes bibliography.

Modern cast coinage

2011-06-24T15:46:00.002-04:00

What modern country's largest denomination coin is cast rather than struck?

Visit to Ireland

2011-05-26T13:54:00.003-04:00

Today I visited the A thousand years of Irish coins and currency exhibit at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin.

It features a good collection of Irish coins and related material from the 10th century through the Euro. The photograph is of the most surprising feature: one of the ramps features a hollow handrail which has been filled with old coins.

There are a few Roman and medieval coins at the Irish Archaeology Museum but I did not find them exciting. The earliest two Roman coins on display were misidentified. The first one, an impressive aes grave is labeled as depicting Janus. It looked like Zeus to me but I suspect it is the bearded man that numismatists call Saturn. Either way, it cannot be Janus because Janus would have two heads.

The only coin shop in Dublin (actually a stall in the Georges Street Arcade) is Lír Coins & Collectables. No ancients were offered and only a few hammered could be found. The stock is mostly coins of the Irish Republic and of Great Britain.

Irish Mint products can be purchased at the Central Bank of Ireland on Dame street. I went there on the day of Obama's visit. The teller at the collectable coins window was happy to show me the items available for purchase (which are the same items as the web site offers).

I tried to get a roll of circulating euro coins at a regular bank but they did not know the term 'roll'. Irish banks keep Euro coins in plastic bags. The 2 cent bag contains 100 pieces.

F. Michael Fazzari on cast fakes

2011-04-29T09:37:00.002-04:00

F. Michael Fazzari writes for Numismaster that Cast Counterfeits Share Some Traits. The article includes two coin surfaces under extreme magnification. The first has pimples of metal because it is a cast fake. The second is genuine and has pimples because it was heated. Fazzari says the pimples on the genuine coin can be “squeezed flat with your finger.”

Use computers to calculate book prices

2011-04-23T21:21:00.002-04:00

This is not a numismatic post; it is about the pricing of uncommon books.

The blog “it is NOT junk&rdquo noticed a book on fruit fly DNA selling for $1,730,045.91. Instead of assuming a typo the blogger followed the book and watched as the price rose to an astonishing $23,698,655.93 then crashed to $106.23.

It's suspected that no human entered these prices. Instead, two competing stores probably used computer algorithms to price the books.

(via Marginal Revolution)

Ted Rall on the Liberty postage stamp and declining coin standards

2011-04-22T10:27:00.002-04:00

Cartoonist Ted Rall blogs about The Statue of Liberty Stamp Error and the End of America.

The Cyrillic alphabet, when italicized, ... changes

2011-04-21T22:27:00.003-04:00

Just a brief note that the the Cyrillic alphabet, when italicized, changes in profound ways. I wanted to translate a short section heading — 30 words — from the Bulgarian section of Stavri Topalov's Apollonia Pontika: Contribution to the Study of the Coin Minting of the City 6th-1st c. B.C.. It took me over an hour to type those words into my computer.

The problem is that, although I almost know the lower-case Cyrillic letters, they all change in italics! Wikipedia has a convenient chart showing the especially tricky letters in blue.

To enter Cyrillic letters I use the Windows 'Character Map' or the similar Insert|Symbol in Microsoft Word. Both of these tools can show Cyrillic, but they show the non-Italicized version, with letterforms very different from what I was seeing on the printed page.

If anyone knows of a better Cyrillic keyboard, perhaps web-based, that includes the Italicized letters, please let me know.

Hill's Greek Coins of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia

2011-04-04T20:53:00.003-04:00

I purchased a new printing of George F. Hill's Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia (1897) for $14 plus shipping. You can get a copy from On Demand Books. The reprint is a paperback, printed and bound on demand by the Espresso Book Machine.

The usual Forni hardcover reprints are $145 — ten times as much.

The input to the Espresso is Google's scanned copy. Google scanned two copies of this book, Harvard's and that of the New York Public Library. I chose the NYPL copy. The text is clean and easy to read. There are a few problems early on — stray fingers on a few pages, and NYPL stamps, but the text is very clear. I was surprised that off-white paper was used. I was also surprised the orange gradient cover Google shows was not used. Instead there is a blue-on white cover that mentions the Harvard Book Store. The quality of printing is at least as good as the Google PDF downloads and may be better. I know that Google scanned the books at higher resolution than they offer, and that the original lending institution got the hi resolution copies. I don't know if On Demand Books has access to these higher resolution copies.

The plates are nearly the correct size: 97% actual. For comparison, my Forni copy of BMC Pontos is 99.5% actual and my Elibron copy of BMC Peloponnesus is only 79%.

The big flaw is Google's algorithm to detect photo captions on the plates. Perhaps 20% of the plated coins were changed to black smudges because Google's algorithms thought those smudges were captions. What's worse is that the smudges that appear on Google's own site have recently improved a bit. They now seem to have four levels of black. The printed copy just uses pure black. The caption detection does provide a slight improvement on actual captions, making them pure black instead of dark gray.

A second flaw is that Google doesn't offer BMC volumes for Cilicia, Lydia, Cyprus, Phrygia, Phoenicia, Palestine, Arabia, nor Cyrenaica. The problem is copyright. The volumes by George Hill and E. S. G. Robinson are under copyright. Those authors are unlikely to 'opt in' to any Google reprinting scheme because they did not opt in to the Copyright Clearance Center scheme (which would have gotten them royalties for photocopies.) So I will not be able to complete my set of BMC without eight expensive volumes.

It is unclear if Hill, Robinson, and the British Museum 'opted in' to Forni's reprint series in the 1960s. Italian copyright law was not very strict until the mid 1990s. (I would love to know if the blue Forni hardcovers still being made are 'legit' or 'bootlegs'.)

Two other on-demand publishers have entered the fray. “Nabu Press” and Kessinger both offer Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Lycia, Pamphylia, and Pisidia for about $34 plus shipping. Kessinger even claims to be able to print a hard-copy for $43. (I got burned with a poor quality Kessinger title and have avoided them since then.)

Readers who are interested in other BMC Greek titles can get a list on my web site of the down-loadable and reprint copies I know of.

Mugardos remonetizes peseta

2011-03-10T20:44:00.002-05:00

The BBC News is reporting that 60 shops in Mugardos (“a small fishing town in Galicia on Spain's northern coast”) are again accepting the peseta for all purchases alongside the Euro.

Shopkeepers were sceptical at first, but they now say the scheme is a great success.

People are travelling into Mugardos from outside just to spend the old currency they never got round to converting.

One man visited the local hardware store this week with a 10,000-peseta note he had found at home, and had no idea what to do with.

He is now the happy owner of a sandwich toaster.

I had not realized that peseta currency ”can still be converted today, but only at the Bank of Spain itself”.

(via Marginal Revolution. The coin image is public domain; from Wikipedia.)

Museum exhibit on counterfeits (in Missouri)

2011-03-01T10:02:00.002-05:00

The Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri (in Columbia, Missouri) will be exhibiting ancient and modern counterfeits of coins as part of CIA: Counterfeits, Imitations and Alterations of Ancient Coins through July 31.

Tony Puricelli reviewed the show for The (University of Missouri) Maneater.

I won't be able to travel to Missouri this year; if any readers make it to the show please leave a blog comment.

Coins smuggled out of India

2011-01-03T13:21:00.001-05:00

The Telegraph of India reports that India continues to have a problem with criminals smuggling coins out of the country.

The coins being smuggled are not ancient coins. The problem is with steel coins introduced in 1988. As we reported in 2007, the coins are being melted down to make razor blades.

Counterfeit Euro coin detectors

2010-12-14T13:49:00.004-05:00

The European Anti-Fraud Office maintains a list of machines capable of authenticating Euro coins. Currently there are about 50 machine types approved.

This list is now very important, because a new regulation, which comes fully into force January 2012, requires every Euro country to have enough machines to check “25% of the total cumulated net volume of coins issued by that Member State from the introduction of euro coins until the end of the previous year.” I'm not sure what that means; the number of coins must be in the hundreds of billions, although the regulation later talks about only the three highest circulation denominations (currently €2, €1, and €0.50).

The regulation is written in legal language and is full of references to organizations I know nothing about such as the “Counterfeit Coin Experts Group”, “Coin National Analysis Centre” and the “European Technical and Scientific Centre”.

Even if sufficient machines existed to check 25% of coins existed, how would the coins arrive at the machine to be checked? Do banks have enough coins to meet the requirement or will citizens be required to bring in their piggy banks and coffee cans?

The image is of one of the approved machines, the CT Coin Pelican 309S, which can check 1100 coins / minute. The image comes from NoteCheckers.com (providing “Counterfeit Currency Detectors & Cash Management Equipment for the UK, Ireland & Export”.

People collect 19th century “counterfeit detectors”, I wonder if any of my readers are collecting the approved EU counterfeit detectors?

CNG fall book sale

2010-11-15T09:21:00.001-05:00

The CNG fall book sale includes many bargains, including Lindgren's European Mints for $15 and Lindgren III for $10.

Lambskins may be suitable for Numismatic study, the horse is not

2010-11-10T14:36:00.003-05:00

The Wikipedia article “Numismatics&rdquo says “The Kyrgyz people used horses as the principal currency unit and gave small change in lambskins. The lambskins may be suitable for numismatic study, but the horse is not.”

I am not sure of the origin of that phrase; it was added by Wikipedia user “Wragge” in May 2005. (I would be curious to know if Wragge lifted that phrase from an earlier writer.)

The Kyrgyz people now use the Kyrgyzstani Som but in India one may now deposit goats into a local bank.

Women in remote Korawan, 70 km from Allahabad, have come up with a novel bank which exclusively deals with goats — accepting the animal as savings and lending it out as loans.

"Prema and her friends hailing from Afrozi village have establish a bank which deals exclusively in goats," development block coordinator Subedar Singh told PTI.

In tough terrains of Mirzapur district, most of the people are engaged in crushing stone to earn a living.

"Wives of these people help them in crushing stones and breed two-three goats for additional income," Singh said.

"Though the area is best suited for goat breeding, no effort was made to establish it as a full fledged business activity," he said.

"We provide goats to women having interest in taking up breeding as a full-time activity as loan. When a goat gives birth to kids, generally two to three in numbers, one of them is deposited with the bank again," Prema explained.

Goats in the bank are medically examined every week.

"In case a goat dies, then it is either replaced from the market or from the bank depending upon the availability," Prema said.

Full Disclosure

2010-11-06T10:21:00.001-04:00

From the catalog of Sotheby's November 1858 auction of the Whittall collection:

Great care has been taken to exclude false coins; but if any coin should be suspected at the time of sale, it is to be withdrawn, as Mr. Whittall will not consent to sell as false what he is confident to be genuine. This observation applies also to Lot 293, in which instance alone the writer differs from his employer as to the authenticity of any coin contained herein.

Lot 293 was a tetradrachm of Tenos similar to this one.

I don't know who served as cateloger for Sothehby's in the 1850s. He must have held a great deal of power. I can't imagine a modern coin dealer allowing an employee or contractor to publicly doubt his counterfeit-spotting eye in the dealer's own catalog!

I do not know what the lot sold for. There is a '1' printed next to it; I assume that is the estimate, £1. The lot description itself repeats the warning, being followed with “⁂The authenticity is left to individual opinion.”

Charles Doyle relaunches CoinReplicas.com

2010-10-26T09:25:00.001-04:00

Peter Rosa's nephew Charles Doyle has revamped his website. The San Francisco Chronicle web site is carrying his press release.

For more information on Peter Rosa see Classical Deception by Wayne Sayles or “Fake Coin Factory” by Larry Stevens.

Google Translate now supports Latin

2010-09-30T06:28:00.002-04:00

The Official Google Blog is reporting Google Translate now supports Latin.

The choice of Latin doesn't seem to appear on the main translation page (selecting 'Language Tools' from www.google.com) yet but can be seen here.

Jewelry and furniture

2010-09-28T16:30:00.005-04:00

Tine de Ruysser makes banknote jewelry.

When I make jewellery from valid banknotes, it is like making gold jewellery: everyone can see that the jewellery is worth money. The jewellery is pretty, and comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. The price changes accordingly.
All banknotes are valid currency at the time the jewellery is made. The banknotes are only folded and not damaged in any way: no cutting is used, nor is any glue applied. Each note can be unfolded and used as currency....

I do not think I could pull off this look! Note that ‘jewellery’ is a British spelling; not a typo.

If the jewelry does not appeal how about some of Johhny Swing's furniture (from 2008).

Highly descriptive title for a numismatic article

2010-09-28T13:08:00.003-04:00

In the category “Most descriptive title for a numismatic exhibit review” I nominate VietNamNet Bridge's story (no byline) 1000 turtles, 1000 ancient coins, 1000 farming utensils to be exhibited.

Richard L. Francis Jr. says 'Don't Reveal Detection Secrets'

2010-08-27T12:08:00.001-04:00

An editorial in Numismatic News by Richard L. Francis Jr. complains that by publishing counterfeit diagnostic information the numismatic community is aiding forgers.

Mr. Francis is technically correct but misguided. His solution is to keep the information secret on a web site. He says only ANA members with at least five years should be allowed to use the site. Mr. Francis' recommendation is a poor one. He assumes that forgers have less than five years of ANA membership, and don't know any gullible ANA members who would share the password with them.

For ancient coins the ISBCC has keeps a secure anti-counterfeit website, http://ibscc.coinarchives.com/login.php. Not all the members check it before accepting fakes for auction. Interested collectors play an important role in keeping things working.

The reason counterfeit information should be available to the public is that sharing it helps collectors to detect fakes more than it helps forgers to hide them.

... the cash on the ice is recycled

2010-07-25T17:59:00.002-04:00

needcoffee dot com's Widgett interviews David Parker of Wells Fargo who explains the ATM in Antarctica.

Stolen Valor Act Held Unconstitutional

2010-07-16T11:14:00.002-04:00

Eugene Volokh just blogged that the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional.

The Stolen Valor Act is a 2006 law that was designed to punish creeps who pretend to be soldiers by buying and displaying medals as if they earned them in the military. Unfortunately, it also banned mailing military medals and collecting old medals such as Civil War medals.

I think Volokh is reporting the whole law has been thrown out. If Congress decides to pass an new version I hope they focus on creepy impostors and grant exceptions for museums, films, and collectors.

New symbol for the Indian Rupee

2010-07-15T09:25:00.004-04:00

D. Udaya Kumar's design for the rupee symbol has been approved by the Indian Ministry of Finance.

For India, the next step after government approval is submission to the Unicode Consortium...

Article on fine art forgery in the New Yorker

2010-07-09T16:30:00.002-04:00

Readers, I haven't been posting lately. Everything is OK, I am just too busy these days to post.

David Grann has a story in The New Yorker about fine art authentication. If you read it make sure to read the whole thing—the tone changes about half-way through.

The article did not mention that it's easy to make replicas of human fingers from photographs using the techniques of Japanese security expert Tsutomu Matsumoto. So if you have a photograph of an Old Master's fingerprint please don't put it on the Internet!

over 90% of €500 notes owned by criminals

2010-05-14T11:15:00.003-04:00

A BBC story by Dominic Casciani reports that “more than 90% of the 500 euro notes that are provided in the UK have actually gone into the hands of serious organised criminals.”

A story by James Boxell in the Financial Times headlined “UK bars €500 note imports over crime fear” says banks and currency exchanges will be banned from importing the denomination. It isn't clear if individuals may still import €500 notes. Boxell reports that “... it has not been criminalised and people will still be able to pay them into UK bank accounts.”

Strangely, Boxell's report says that although the finance industry doesn't mind the restriction “... there were some objections from banknote makers.” Really? I would suspect banknote makers would applaud the new move, as criminals will now need five times as much of their product!

Call for papers on the destruction of casts of ancient art

2010-05-07T10:03:00.002-04:00

Via Rogue Classicism: September 24-25, 2010
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York DESTROY THE COPY! A WORKSHOP ON THE FATE OF PLASTER CAST COLLECTIONS

... Plaster cast collections of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture usually formed a core part of royal, museum, and finally university collections. Their heyday is marked by the nineteenth century when the cast collections—by now including other periods— constituted universal museums in Europe and in the United States. However, the nineteenth century marks also the beginning of a decline in the reputation of plaster casts that eventually ended in entire collections being dispersed and discarded, if not actively demolished. Our workshop aims to inquire the reasons for these destructive acts...

When provenance becomes to cheap to meter

2010-04-13T15:40:00.002-04:00

Jim Giles reports for New Scientist on “Barcodes help objects tell their stories”:

The Tales of Things website, which goes live this week, aims to take this idea into a new realm. It allows users to create an entry on the site for any object they like. A basic entry features an image and associated text, but audio, video and other content can also be added. The site then generates a unique two-dimensional barcode, known as a QR code, for the user to print off and attach to the object.

...

Linking objects with people's memories of those items could be one of the most interesting uses for the site, says Andrew Hudson-Smith of University College London, one of the five UK academic institutions behind the project. Museum curators have also expressed an interest in tagging their collections, he says.

(via Bruce Sterling: Beyond the Beyond)

George Kolbe auction 110

2010-04-09T13:04:00.002-04:00

Apologies for light posting the past month.

The catalog for George Kolbe Auction 110 is now online. 565 lots of numismatic books, closing May 13th.

Chinese civil servant to throw ancient coins into ocean

2010-03-01T11:02:00.003-05:00

A strange report in People's Daily Online notes that Zhang Feng, civil servant of Qingdao city, will scatter about 70 coins of the Ming Dynasty (1405 to 1433 AD), each glued to one yuan coins released of 2009, into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans during the upcoming “Clipper Round the World Yacht Race.”

"The reason that we will scatter the ancient coins into sea, which Zheng He had brought to many countries, is that we want to tell the world that China is back to adventure at seas." Zhang Feng said.

It is surprising that China is announcing a new seagoing effort by coin tossing rather than through radio, television and Twitter.

New oline issue of Counterfeit Coin Newsletter

2010-02-17T09:29:00.002-05:00

Issue 13 of Robert Matthews' Counterfeit Coin Newsletter is available on his web site. It includes short coverage of a 2009 'hoard' of late Roman bronze, then ten most expensive counterfeits authenticated by PCGS, Turkish tourist fakes, and as usual coverage of fake UK 1 pound coins.

(There is also a nice photo of an ornamental vase made of old coins the author saw on holiday in the Ukraine.)

Newton and the Counterfeiter is briefly reviewed, as well as scientific papers on "Using the optical mouse sensor as a two-euro counterfeit coin detector" and "Laser and electron beams physical analysis applied to the comparison between two silver tetradrachm Greek coins".

Blood Antiquities documentary

2010-02-10T14:27:00.004-05:00

Blood Antiquities is a 47 minute documentary on antiquities smuggling. No coins so far (I haven't watch the whole thing.)

At 2:24 and 9:00 we see video of Arthur Brand, who sometimes posts under the alias 'Euainetos', and whom many people used to believe was a false identify of Michel van Rijn

The filmmakers show antiquities dealers in Belgium filmed both with and without hidden cameras. There are also a lot of village and museum footage from Afghanistan.

2010-02-07T20:21:00.002-05:00

Here we have bronze coin of Pyrrhos of Epiros depicting a Macedonian shield with Phyrrhos' monogram. (This coin is not in my collections).

On the right is the description of the coin from Barclay Head's Historia Numorum, p. 230. The description shows the Greek inscription ΠΥΡ (Pyr) with a line over it.

What does this line mean, and how should it be encoded for web pages?

When I converted the Historia Numorum to HTML I rendered the line using inline CSS with an 'overline' text decoration:

<span style="text-decoration: overline;">

It is also possible to render such text using the Unicode 'combining overline', U+0305. Here are two examples:

ΠΥΡ (CSS)
Π̅Υ̅Ρ̅ (combining overlines).

The first format, using a CSS style, looks great in browsers but when the text is selected and copied to Notepad it loses the overline. The second format, using a Unicode combining character, looks terrible on Firefox/WinXP, but can be copied to Windows Notepad with the overline intact.

Until recently I thought the overline indicated a monogram, but Bradley Hudson McLean (An Introduction to Greek Epigraphy, p. 56) explains that the line is an 'abbreviation mark' or 'abbreviation sign' indicating that not all letters are present. This convention was used by engravers and also medieval copyists.

McLean also has a short description of ligatures on page 55, and his examples are the same as some two-letter symbols for magistrates that I have been calling 'monograms'. Usually when we think of ligatures today we think of printers combining ff or ffi for legibility but McLean also mentions the Roman practice of putting one letter on the other, called 'compendia'.

An example of a compendia on a coin is the OV-ligature on this coin of Nikopolis ad Istrum, right before the 12 o'clock position. I don't know of a good way to render compendia in HTML.

bleg: Where can I get a Zero Rupee note?

2010-01-26T08:39:00.004-05:00

I blogged two years ago about the zero rupee note. I would like one for my collection and have been unable to locate them. Does anyone know where I can find a collectable one? Preferably one that actually was used over a gem unc specimen.

High resolution zero rupee notes can be downloaded from 5th pillar. Maybe the intention is that users should print them themselves.

The World bank is now blogging about the notes.

The notes are available in the Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam languages.

Is the word 'triskeles' the plural of 'triskele'?

2010-01-24T22:38:00.005-05:00

In numismatics, 'triskeles' is singular. For example, John Melville Jones (A Dictionary of Ancient Greek Coins) defines it as “... a device formed or based upon three legs joined at the hip...”. [emphasis mine].

Wikipedia and Wiktionary considers the word to be 'triskele'. 'triskeles' is the plural of 'triskele'. This isn't merely a Wikipedia error, the Oxford English Dictionary considers the word to be 'triskele', although it undermines itself because of one its reference citations uses 'triskeles' in a singular context.

Google Books knows of 846 mentions of 'triskele' and 780 mentions of 'triskeles'. Some of the triskeles mentions are from numismatic fields, which use the word as a singular, and others are clearly using it as a plural (for example, discussing “scrolls and triskeles”.

The earliest English reference in Google Books to 'triskele' is 1868, The runic hall in the Danish old-northern museum by George Stephens. The earliest singular reference to 'triskeles' is an article on acquisitions of the British Museum in The Classical Review from 1889.

I discussed this topic in a thread on FORUM's Classical Numismatics Discussion Board where it came out that the Greek word Tri-skelês is an adjective and thus neither singular nor plural. A similar Greek word that made it into English as an adjective is 'isosceles' used to describe triangles.

I believe there are enough authorities using 'triskeles' as a singular to get it into the OED and other dictionaries as a variant spelling of 'triskele'. Certainly Barclay Head uses it as singular, and the OED cites him as an authority under 'triskeles' (for the similar word 'triskelion'). I think we have a case of the same Greek word being borrowed into English twice — with different spellings!

Syracusan dekadrachms for sale, in Chicago, below melt value

2010-01-24T09:07:00.002-05:00

The New York Times reported (no byline) on October 9, 1939 that Nate Lew, owner of a Chicago second-hand store, bought 23 stolen Greek coins for $2. The coins included 10 Syracusan dekadrachms.

The coins were stolen on June 3, 1939 from the Philadephia Academy of Fine Arts. “Gis Butz, 54 years old, who had one of the [dekadrachms], and Nicholas Niketas, 45, who had the other nine, had been charged with with disorder conduct.... Nate Lew is aiding the police in tracing the three coins still missing.”.

At over 40 grams each the dekadrachms alone would have contained at least 400g of silver, 12 and a half ounces. Two US silver dollars would have contained one and a half ounces of silver. So the thieves sold the dekadrachms to Nate Lew for less than 12% of melt value.

Imagine walking into a second-hand store with 10 dekadrachms and 13 other museum quality ancients, asking for $5 or $10 for the lot, and being talked down to $2! Nate Lew drives a hard bargain.

Coin show in NYC

2010-01-08T10:12:00.002-05:00

There is a big coin show in New York City this week. I'll be there tomorrow.

Here is an article on coin show security by Col. Steven Ellsworth.

Bookride on book thieves

2010-01-04T08:15:00.000-05:00

I remain too busy to post. Here is a link to Robin Healey blogging for Bookride on book thieves.

Cool Jobs: Forgery Expert

2009-12-11T13:43:00.000-05:00

I've been too busy to post lately.

Here is a 4 minute video about the job of detecting fake antiquities (mostly lamps).

Minimum Wage Machine

2009-12-01T12:23:00.003-05:00

Blake Fall-Conroy's Minimum Wage Machine “allows anybody to work for minimum wage” by dispensing a Lincoln cent every 5.04 seconds when a mechanical crank is turned. Turning for an hour will yield 715 (or 714?) cents an hour, or the minimum wage in New York state.

(via bOING bOING)

CoinArchives Pro Academic Edition

2009-11-23T22:01:00.002-05:00

CoinArchives is now offering academic subscriptions with results that don't include auction prices realized. The yearly fee is less than the $600 professionals pay. How much less? I don't know: “Pricing is based on the number of accounts requested per institution.... Academic Edition accounts are for non-profit research and educational use only.”

Kirtas Books

2009-11-22T21:38:00.003-05:00

Kirtas, the folks who make book scanners, has a new venture KirtasBooks.com to sell print-on-demand copies of scanned books. The web site has a store full of public domain books.

Unlike Elibron, Kirtas is offering to sell books they haven't yet scanned. They have loaded the catalog of the University of Pennsylvania library and the New York Public Library into their database. These libraries have many desirable numismatic works that Kirtas claims to offer in reprint; for example the Photiadès Pacha auction catalog (1890), Imhoof-Blumer's 2 volume Kleinasiatische Münzen (1901), or the three-volume The Weber collection: Greek coins (1922-1929).

I ordered four volumes of BMC Greek published post-1900 that Google doesn't offer.

Kirtas claims to offer these books for $10 in paperback or $20 in hardcover. Download-only will be $2 once someone has paid for paperback or hardcover. I am curious to see if Kirtas can deliver quality and if they seriously intend to sell The Weber Collection (317 plates!) for $20 in hardcover.

To fund this Kirtas offers something I haven't seen before, a patent-pending business model they call “Invest in Knowledge”. For abour $30 you get the paperback plus a 5% royalty whenever anyone buys another copy of the title from Kirtas. So you'll break even if 20 copies sell. (Kirtas is suggesting you should buy this for your grandchildren (!?!) so they must think it will be a long-term money maker.)

I thought about “investing” in the BMC Greek volumes but I somehow doubt Kirtas will sell 20 more copies of these books. Maybe I will be kicking myself for the next century when Kirtas turns itself into the Wal-Mart of 19th century books.

It's not just books on Greek coins, I found the 1866-1869 American Journal of Numismatics also for $10.

If these prices aren't low enough the coupon code Save20%KirtasBooks gives $8 paperbacks and $16 hardcovers.

1824 medal commemorates man hanged for check forgery

2009-11-22T13:20:00.003-05:00

Stephen Adams reports for the Telegraph of London on a medal made in 1824 for check forger Henry Fauntleroy.

Timothy Millett, who is selling the coin at the Olympia Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair in London, said: "At the time it really was a sensational case. He was 'doing a Madoff', you might say. The press absolutely loved it."

[Millett] thought perhaps a few hundred of the 'medals' were made by an entrepreneur looking to make a quick profit from the hanging, bought by people to show they attended "in the same way as we might buy a t-shirt".

Henry Fauntleroy was apparently the last man hanged for check forgery in England.

Using the Optical Mouse Sensor as a Two-Euro Counterfeit Coin Detector

2009-11-22T13:06:00.003-05:00

EurekaAlert.org mentions a paper by Spanish researchers Marcel Tresanchez, Tomàs Pallejà, Mercè Teixidó and Jordi Palacín on detecting counterfeit Euro coins using the sensor from cheap optical mice.

The full report PDF is available from MDPI - Open Access Publishing. The abstract claims the software does as well as a trained human and better than an untrained one. The report was published in Sensors volume 9 issue 9.

The researcher does explain that not just any optical mouse sensor will work, as images must be captured in real time, with a minimum resolution of 15x15 pixels (the team used 30x30 pixels). It is also better to use an LED- or infrared-based sensor, and not laser technology, as these[sic] provide images that are too wide.

Hadrien Rambach library auction

2009-11-22T09:24:00.001-05:00

The catalog for the auction of the Numismatic Library of Hadrien Rambach is now online. 255 lots of books. There are also 48 lots of ancient coins.

The e-Sylum mentioned this last week, but the catalog wasn't available then. Hadrien Rambach is a coin specialist at Spink & Son.

The estimates seem low. Lot 572, Babelon's Inventaire sommaire de la colleciton Waddington (1898, 4 volumes), his Rec. Gen. (1904), and his son's Catalogue de la collection de Luynes (1924-1932), is estimated at only 100 euros.

Whoever made the catalog has copying text to the clipboard disabled, which is profoundly irritating.

A correspondent recently asked why auctioneers make low estimates. He mention the usual reasons (unfamiliarity with the market, desire to inspire new bidders) and the usual problem (bad estimates send a false signal to collectors who then don't research what the usual price is). For books I would add the irritation of storing and returning unsold lots. If a coin doesn't make reserve it can go back into the safe. Who has space for a book that doesn't sell?

Princeton computer science professor and ancient coin collector Kenneth Steiglitz wrote a book, Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior which is apparently on the psychology of auctions including ancient coin auctions on eBay. Has anyone read it? Perhaps it includes the latest research on how buyers and sellers make decisions.

Countermarked Perseus bronze

2009-11-20T22:46:00.003-05:00

Bronze coin of king Perseus of Macedon, 179-168 BC.

This coin has a counterstamp, I believe of a prow.

I couldn't find any other prow counterstamps online. Perseus and his father Philip V struck other coins with prow types though. Is there an online database of counterstamps? I searched ISEGRIM and found Roman coins of the 2nd and 3rd century AD with prow counterstamps, but nothing Hellenistic.

A recent eBay auction of another countermarked Perseus had a similar countermark that could be a prow but could also be almost anything.

Stack family book auction

2009-11-19T16:32:00.002-05:00

The catalog for the Stacks family numismatic library, to be auctioned in New York in January 2010, is up on George Frederick Kolbe's web site.

400 lots. The catalog itself is 171 pages! The lots include Guillaume Bude's De Asse et Partibus (1524!), Haeberlin's Aes Grave (1910), Gnecchi's I Medaglioni Romani (1912) and first editions of BMC Greek (all 29 volumes as a single lot.) The IBSCC's Counterfeit Reports are there, “possibly complete” for 1976-March 1981.

A lot of volumes 1-6 of The Numismatist is estimated at $25,000! Some rare correspondance on the Colonel Green collection and its sale to Egypt's King Farouk is estimated at the same price.

NYC lecture: “Persian gods and kings: the coins of ancient Iran”

2009-11-17T20:45:00.002-05:00

Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, curator of Islamic and Iranian coins at the British Museum, will be lecturing at the ANS tomorrow on “Persian gods and kings: the coins of ancient Iran”.

Google says Ms. Curtis is the project leader of The Sasanian coins project and author of a book on ancient Persian love poetry.

The coinage of Kea

2009-11-17T20:30:00.001-05:00

A reader wrote to tell me that Charikleia Papageorgiadou-Banis' The coinage of Kea (1997) (20mb, 107 pages, 21 plates) can be downloaded from the Helios Repository of the National Hellenic Research Foundation. This book covers the ancient Cycladic mint of Keos (also called Ceos), not the larger island of Chios.

The repository also offers Jennifer Warren's “The bronze coinage of the Achaian League: the mints of Achaia and Elis” (just 4 pages), originally published in Achaia und Elis in der Antike: Akten des 1. Internationalen Symposiums, Athen, 19.-21. Mai 1989 in 1991. Ms. Warren later wrote The Bronze Coinage of the Achaian Koinon.

The site's search showed some other titles but I couldn't download them.

Stahl, The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology, and Classical Studies in the Culture of the Renaissance

2009-11-14T22:25:00.003-05:00

Alan M. Stahl, The Rebirth of Antiquity: Numismatics, Archaeology, and Classical Studies in the Culture of the Renaissance (2009), Princeton University Library (not Press!), 178 5x9’ pages, $40 (currently $35 on Amazon).

A collection of papers on Renaissance numismatics, edited by Alan Stahl, is now available on Amazon.com. I got a $20 copy in May after an e-Sylum announcement. I don't know if those copies are still available.

For $20 I was expecting a photocopied paperback. I received a quality hardcover.

All of the papers are about coin collecting except for Tamara Griggs' which is about antiquities dealers.

I found this book interesting even though I'm not curious about the Renaissance and collecting back then. I'm reasonably educated but not as well as Stahl's contributors — I had to consult a dictionary when reading this. The authors also like to throw in an Italian word here and there which did not help!

For the beginner I'd recommend Bassoli or maybe, if you can find it, Cunnally's Images of the Illustrious (Cunnally also contributed to this volume). If you already have those then you may want this.

John Spring, Ancient Coin Auction Catalogs: 1880-1980

2009-11-14T13:51:00.002-05:00

John Spring, Ancient Coin Auction Catalogs: 1880-1980 (2009), self-published, distributed by Spink (but not yet on their website). 369 large pages describing 886 auction catalogs. Charles Davis is selling this for $110 and CNG is selling slightly bumped copies for $95.

It's a nice book! Every catalog is described by size and color. The number of plates — Celtic, Greek, Roman aes grave, Roman Republican, Roman Imperial, Roman Provincial, Byzantine, and "barbarian migration" — is given. There is often information about the collector, collection, or auctioneer. Sometimes that information comes from the catalog, but Spring also seeks biogrpahical information from other published sources such as obituaries in numismatic journals. The photos depict the collector or firm. The catalogs themselves are not pictured.

The author does not judge the paper quality, the method of reproduction of the plates, nor the numismatic merit of the coins. Tables of the "most important" sales are provided, broken down by category (Greek, Republican, etc), but imporantance for Spring is the number of plates. For example, Spring lists some Alex Malloy sales among the "most important" for Greek and Provincial. I don't know if those Malloy sales were well-made but the Malloy sales I know from the late 1990s were newsprint-quality affairs. If so it is hard for me to accept them as among the most important.

This catalog will shine is when used in conjunction with an auction catalog from a numismatic book dealer by putting the offered catalogs into context with the series of catalogs available. It will also be handy to use this within a large numismatic library like the ANS'. I only have a few of the catalogs and I'm finding it frustrating looking at Spring's book while unable to follow his leads.

I still haven't decided if I want to own and study old auction catalogs. I'm excited about old digitizing catalogs and having the coins online and individually searchable. I enjoy the few catalogs I have. Yet these old catalogs are not cheap. Very few of them illustrate more than 500 Greek coins. Anyone off the street in 2009 can email a dozen dealers and receive sample catalogs postpaid with more illustrated coins. Are these old catalogs still relevant for coin collectors? There is something lovely about the Collotype plates in the better old catalogs.

ANS twitter feed

2009-11-12T15:03:00.002-05:00

The ANS has a good numismatic twitter feed. It's both frequent and high-quality. There is good brief numismatic news and daily numismatic book recommendations.

Sestini's Sopra i moderni falsificatori di medaglie greche antiche

2009-11-11T14:12:00.004-05:00

Google has scanned Domenico Sestini's 1826 book Sopra i moderni falsificatori di medaglie Greche antiche nei tre metalli e descrizione di tutte quelle prodote dai medesimi nello spazio di pochi anni (“On the modern forgers of ancient Greek medals in the three metals and description of all produced by them in the space of a few years”).

Google's copy was scanned at the University of Ghent in March.

I believe this is the oldest illustrated book on fakes meant to deceive coin collectors. There are four plates of drawings. Imagine the difficulty of the collector or dealer in 1826 with this book in determining if a particular ancient coin was a die match for Sestini's drawings.

Counterfeit 1970 Lincoln cent in gold

2009-11-04T21:10:00.002-05:00

A Brooklyn woman received an 18 karet gold counterfeit cent in change at a C-Town grocery store according to New York Times blogger Jennifer 8. Lee.

The fake copper-plated gold penny was put into circulation in Los Angeles in 2007 as a publicity stunt by artist Jack Daws to publicize his limited edition of 10 counterfeit US cents in gold. A Seattle art gallery is selling the other Daws coins for $1000 each.

The melt value of the fake is $100.

The US Secret Service says “Anyone who manufactures a counterfeit U.S. coin in any denomination above five cents is subject to the same penalties as all other counterfeiters.” which seems to rule out a counterfeiting beef for Mr. Daws.

The blogger's middle initial, 8, is not a typo.

Database of Macedonian royal bronze coins

2009-11-04T13:17:00.003-05:00

Macedonian Kingdom: the bronze coinage is a web site with a searchable database of 1470 Macedonian bronze coins.

I found several rarities that I've never seen elsewhere. Although there is a lot of duplication there are some very rare pieces.

The main site is in modern Greek, to get an English version click the image of the Philip bronze then click the tab labled 'English'. This link takes visitors directly to the English search page (but without the intended frames.)

The coins are from the Alpha Bank collection, the Charles Hersh collection (now dispersed), and the Dimitris Portolos collection (now in the Archeological Museum of Thessaloniki).

Medal exhibition opening in NYC on Saturday Nov 7th

2009-11-03T09:49:00.003-05:00

Palva Burroughs, A Great Gnashing of Teeth, 70x108x30mm.

There will be an opening at Medialia ... Rack and Hamper Gallery on Saturday, November 7th (3-6pm). The exhibition is New Ideas in Medallic Sculpture 2009-2010.

Medallic Sculpture from WW I will also be on display, a tribute to medal collector (and friend) David Fleischmann who passed away this year.

English translation of Weidauer's Probleme der frühen Elektronprägung

2009-11-02T19:20:00.001-05:00

Dane Kurth has translated Dr. Liselotte Weidauer's 1975 classic on archaic electrum coins, Probleme der frühen Elektronprägung (Problems of Early Electrum Coinage) into English.

The translation is available in electronic format only (PDF or Word document), and does not include plates. To obtain the translation contact weidauerproject@gmail.com. There is a US$20 fee to cover costs of translation. The translation is authorized by Dr. Liselotte Weidauer.

The book itself, with German text and plates, is available from CNG for $45 plus shipping. $45+$20 is a great deal; a few years ago used originals were selling at auction for $175 plus juice.

Jeffery Morin's $5 million CoinsForAnything empire

2009-11-02T14:51:00.002-05:00

A Washington Post story by Thomas Heath covers the history of coin entrepreneur Jeffery Morin, whose “coin” dealership brings in $5,000,000/year.

During lunch breaks, Morin would run to his barracks, package the coins into bubble-padded envelopes, address them by hand and walk them to the base post office for mailing; the envelope and postage for each coin cost him $1.05, which came off his profit.

...

His mother lent him $500 to buy more coins, and he was quickly earning $300 to $500 a month from the business. Profits went in to buying more coins.

Morin started with “military challenge coins” a kind of military-themed artist's medal.

The web site organizes the medals for sale by artistic theme: Marines, Navy, Air Force, Army and Other. These ‘coins’ cost anywhere from $9 to $16. The more expensive coins have unusual shapes and features, such as this Air Force Knife coin. Visitors can also order coins based on their own artwork (minimum quantity 100 coins, $2.20 per coin).

Morin was 22.

In the past five years, Morin has expanded his coin business beyond the Marines to include other service branches, weddings, sports teams, and corporations such as Starbucks, Delta Air Lines and United Parcel Service. He hired a Web designer to jazz up the online site. He changed his company name from Marine Corps Coins to Coins for Anything and has expanded into trophies, pins and lanyards (the neck straps to which security badges or credentials are attached).

The enterprise now encompasses five companies that will generate around $5 million in revenue this year, with the coins and trophies representing the vast majority. His costs include $2.5 million for the products, $500,000 in payroll for 16 employees, and about $7,000 a month in rent on a 4,000-square-foot headquarters in a Stafford office park. He pays Google around $1 million a year.

The knife coin looks cool! I think Jeffery Morin even beat the Pobjoy mint on that one. Maybe next year Palau or Liberia will be minting legal tender folding knives.

Dimitar Draganov to be tried for treasure hunting

2009-10-30T12:08:00.004-04:00

Professor Dimitar Draganov, perhaps the most famous Bulgarian numismatist (see his 37 papers) was arrested in 2008 for intending to profit from selling archaeological findings according to a story in The Sofia Echo by Petar Kostadinov.

...

Police found about 400 ancient coins, worth 370 000 leva, in Draganov’s home.

According to police, the coins were about to be sold abroad, with Draganov hired to record them as an expert. Draganov’s version of the story is different. He said that the coins were part of a collection owned by the Bobokovi Foundation and his job was indeed to register them as archaeological artefacts so that a catalogue could be compiled and a book written about them.

“The Bobokovi Foundation” are the brothers whose collection of coins from Deultum takes an entire SNG, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Bulgaria, Thrace and Moesia Inferior, Vol. 1, Deultum. Draganov seems to have done nothing wrong:

"The collection which police confiscated from my desk, I received from the Bobokovi brothers with a protocol so that I can do research on it. I did so, and it won me the sole prize awarded at the 14th International Numismatic Congress held in Glasgow this past September," [Draganov] said.

The Numismatic Congress web site says the prize was a Numismatic Congress medal for the best poster. The poster was “The Coinage of the Scythian kings in the West Pontic Area; Iconography”.

Go read the full story.

Antiquities Smuggling Video

2009-10-29T10:26:00.003-04:00

A 1997 17 minute documentary on Turkish antiquities smuggling produced by Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Journeyman Pictures, which seems to own the rights and uploaded the clip to YouTube, has not provided the credits and I don't know who the reporter is.

Rhousopoulos catalog

2009-10-27T22:31:00.004-04:00

I stumbled across Google's downloadable Rhousopoulos catalog today.

4627 Greek coins described and pictured on 58 plates, auctioned by Hirsch in 1905. Original copies cost $1200.

Google gives this work the title Auctions-catalog einer sammlung griechischer münzen aus dem nachlasse eines ....

A few other Hirsch sales:

November 1905 [many plates poorly scanned]
May 1907 (Imhoof-Blumer and others)
November 1908 (Eduard Friedrich Weber)

If any numismatic sites are tracking and organizing the important auction catalogs being posted by Google please let me know. I can't keep up any longer.

Lexicon of Greek Coin Inscriptions, Volume II

2009-10-22T13:10:00.003-04:00

Volume 2 of Wolfgang Leschhorn's Lexikon der Aufschriften auf griechischen Münzen (AKA Lexicon of Greek Coin Inscriptions) is now available.

I have not yet seen it. (I have volume 1. I almost never consult it as I almost never need to identify Greek coins by inscription.)

Volume 1 was large and thick (426 pages), volume 2 is said to be 1092 pages! The price is €159. Volume 2 looks to be interesting — the first major catalog of magistrates on coins since Münsterberg's Die Beamtennamen auf den griechischen Münzen of 1911-1927.

The web site mentions an online edition with a different ISBN and provides a password-protected link for access. The online edition password doesn't seem to be available for purchase yet. The prices of online books from this publisher, Austrian Acadamy of Sciences Press, that are available for purchase range from €0 to €49.

Extracting plates from Google books

2009-10-21T13:29:00.002-04:00

Mediterranean Ceramics posts Brief Thoughts on EPUB Books at Google

...
Once you've downloaded that file, it's easy to unpack. I'm a Mac/Linux user. If you are too, and you like the command line, 'unzip Catalogue_of_Arretine_pottery.epub' will do the trick. Otherwise, change the extension to ".zip" and double-click on the file. I'm sure something similar will work in Windows.

Once unpacked, you have two directories, 'OEBPS' and 'META-INF'. The first is the one with all the goodies in it. Open 'OEBPS/images' and you'll see the plates from the book. Those files aren't hi-res, but better than nothing.

Bookride comments on Google

2009-10-19T10:19:00.001-04:00

Bookride comments on Google books

Buying out of print books ('orphans' in googlespeak) from book dealers has a great deal to be said for it but money is sometimes tight and many books are too rare to be affordable or even to be available. As a dealer I see the scheme opening up the market rather than harming it. New collectors, readers and book enthusiasts will be created by this bold 'Forever' project - especially among the under thirty crowd, who are now seldom seen in bookshops or at bookfairs; those born after the year of the Jubilee and Punk (1977) i.e. the post-literate generation. Sergey was four at the time but by the time he was 26 he had accumulated well over 15,000 real books...

Database of 28,298 coins

2009-10-18T20:21:00.000-04:00

The American School of Classical Studies at Athens has a database of 28,298 coins, many with low-resolution black and white photos.

The database is a bit tricky to search. To search use the small white box in the upper right corner reading category:coin. Add search terms but keep the coin category or the search will include non-coin finds like pottery fragments.

Egypt running out of mummies?

2009-10-15T21:04:00.002-04:00

Egypt's mummy population is dwindling, reports satirical newspaper The Onion:

Afterlife Preservation Society president James Amarcas said he can recall a time when Egyptians did not have to go to a museum, but could look out their window and see an entire herd of shroud-wrapped forms staggering on missions of revenge.

"My grandchildren have still never seen a mummy," said Amarcas, who vividly recalls his first mummy sighting in 1947, when he was just 3 years old. "These terrible monsters are little more than a legend to them. It's sad to think they might never see the bloodthirsty march of an undead Egyptian prince on a cool, calm night."

Prospects for Egypt's mummies are grim. A population that reached more than 12,000 in 1970 has today dropped to less than 300.

Hess-Divo to auction Frank Sternberg's library

2009-10-09T21:32:00.002-04:00

Hess-Divo is auctioning the numismatic library of dealer Frank Sternberg.

Apparently 1193 lots, all on ancients. 358 lots just on Greeks!

Online bidding ends October 28. The estimates are very low. I do not think you will be able to pick up a complete set of BMC Greek for 1000 Swiss francs, nor a folio-sized first edition of Percy Gardner's The Types of Greek Coins: An Archaeological Essay (1883) for 50 francs.

Notes on Alan Walker's review of Benner's Achaian League Coinage of the 3rd Through 1st Centuries B.C.E.

2009-10-09T15:15:00.003-04:00

Alan Walker reviewed Steve M. Benner's Achaian League Coinage of the 3rd Through 1st Centuries B.C.E. for the September 2009 issue of The Celator. It's a long review and an even longer version of the review is available from Walker and (soon) on The Celator's Website.

The book being reviewed is #7 in the series Classical Numismatic Studies published by Classical Numismatic Group. It costs $65. I haven't seen the book but believe the review itself is worth commenting on.

Alan Walker's review is important. He spends 12 single-spaced pages correcting Benner's mistakes and typos. Anyone interested in Achaian League coinage needs the review to annotate their copy of this book~~, their copies of General M. G. Clerk's Catalogue of the Coins of the Achaean League (1895, recently reprinted from scans), and Margaret Thompson's The Agrinion Hoard (1968)~~ with corrections. Numismatic scholars with little interest in League coinage should still read Walker's review. His complaints about the structure of this book explain how scholars use numismatic references and what a book should have. The ideal structure of scholarly numismatic books is not discussed anywhere else that I know of.

Although Walker has a few positive things to say (e.g. “... the photographs are as good as they can be ...”) much of the review is negative

... I found it tremendously disappointing. It contains so many mistakes, both of fact and of organization, that the only way to correct it would be to re-write it.

Someone at CNG green-lighted this book before it was ready. The volumes in the Classical Numismatic Studies series by Brian Kritt and David MacDonald are quite good. Classical Numismatic Studies does not have a named ‘series editor’. With authors like Kritt and MacDonald a heavy-handed editor isn't needed.

Walker's most biting comments are directed at the poor organization of the catalog rather than simple inscription misreadings.

“[Benner] confuses issues with varieties”
“instead of making an alphabetical list of names ... [Benner] has made a list that is in alphabetical order by mint ... making it a real chore to find anything.”
“the Greek lunate sigma, ϲ, is sometimes listed under sigma, but sometimes at the beginning of the alphabet, as if it were a Latin C ...”
Use of a monogram table instead of putting monograms inline
the monogram table is not indexed back to the catalog
Benner credits dealers for photographs but doesn't provide the auction name and lot number
The concordance appendix is reversed from the usual practice

Many of the mistakes that Benner made are mistakes that I could easily make. I'm mostly self-taught. The structural principals Walker describes are not codified anywhere that I've found.

Until I read Walker's article I didn't understand the meaning of ‘issue’. It's not defined Melville-Jones' A Dictionary of Ancient Greek Coins. Walker explains

Normally an issue is considered to be a single discrete series struck under a single magistrate, who may have a number of junior colleagues who also sign the dies using full or abbreviated names, monograms, symbols or a combination (Athenian New Style tetradrachms are like this, as are any number of other coin series). Coins of a single issue can vary in the way the magistrate’s name is placed, often just due to the whim of the die cutter; thus, a single issue can contain many varieties due to changes in the junior magistrates or from the way the die engraver arranged the legend. In some cases, all the varieties of an issue are simply die variants. SMB, however, confuses issues with varieties: he apparently considers every change in legend, no matter how slight, to indicate a new issue.

Putting magistrate lists in alphabetical order by mint rather than by magistrate name implies that Benner has not spent a lot of time looking up magistrates in catalogs. The purpose of the list of names is to help people look them up, not to know which magistrates worked in which cities.

Regarding alphabetizing, I can't add much to Wikipedia's article on Collation. Sorting foreign languages can be hard for English speakers. It's also hard for computers (and impossible for computers without correct multi-alphabet typesetting.)

If space and paper quality permit it's always better to include symbols and photos inline. No one wants to flip around trying to find things.

The lack of an index back to the catalog implies that Benner has not spent a lot of time looking up symbols in catalogs. Benner probably knows Achaian League coinage well enough that he no longer needs his own tables. Lack of two-way indexes is a common problem in numismatic books. I often see coin on plates I cannot find it in the text. Usually this is because the text and plates are in a slightly different order, or the plated coin is only discussed in a footnote! I once spent over an hour trying to find a coin in a short article written in modern Greek that used Greek numerals. Remember that if your numismatic book becomes important most of your readers are not yet born. Don't expect them to read the way you do.

When citing coins it's always best to include as much information as possible so future authors can track your sources back. In his review, Walker shows that Benner uses the same coin to illustrate his Dyme #11 and Dyme #13. This wasn't a simple typo — one photo came from Clerk's 1895 plates and the other was cited by Benner cited as “Dr. Busso Peus Nachf”. Walker tracked that coin to a specific sale (Peus 378, 28 April 2004, lot 142). I was surprised to see a Clerk coin at auction because Walker tells us elsewhere that “in 1920, after his death, [Clerk's] collection went to the British Museum” Perhaps this coin was sold by the BM, such as in the famous “Duplicates” sale, Ars Classica V, June 1923? It's awkward that Benner didn't notice the coin was the same but I've had a hard time telling myself especially if photos of casts are used. The general principal is to leave enough clues behind so future scholars can track back your work to published sources.

The backwards concordance indicates that Benner hasn't spent time going through coins cataloged under an old system and using a concordance to find the new numbers. I am not a cataloger like Walker and I've never done it either although I knew what a concordance was for. Note that the Wikipedia definition of concordance doesn't describe the numismatic kind. Is there a book for numismatic scholars that defines ‘concordance’? I know of none.

I hope Walker's review becomes widely known among numismatic authors. Perhaps my review-review will inspire someone, even Walker himself, to write essays describing the organization of numismatic reference works and to document how they are employed in the course of numismatic research.

[Update 10-11-09] Alan Walker reminds me that his review of Benner does not contain corrections to Clerk nor Thompson.

Nobel

2009-10-09T10:04:00.001-04:00

If this medal was a Roman Coin, how would you catalog this obverse?

Add your suggestion to the comments.

SWAT team raids orchid grower

2009-10-06T04:21:00.002-04:00

Last year I wrote an editorial for The Celator about how ancient coins could be controlled but self-registered to avoid the difficulties of an official government registry. I mentioned the problems of the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) treaty at controlling ivory.

A recent story on problems with CITES for flowers surprised me. An elephant has feelings, but a flower seems like just a flower. Yet the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service takes orchids very seriously:

When 60-year-old Kathy Norris asked court officials why U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's very own SWAT team had raided and ransacked her home, they helpfully explained, “You don't need to know. You can't know.”

George [Norris], along with his business associate Peruvian grower Manuel Arias-Silver, is charged with conspiracy to smuggle endangered phragmipediums (orchids) into the U.S. Since Manuel is one of only three growers to have been given permission by the Peruvian government to artificially propagate the newly discovered phragmipedium Kovachii, it appears that the U.S. government has singled out the pair for special attention over suspicions that this is the species they were smuggling. There appears to be little evidence of this, though it is likely the pair were taking some shortcuts on paperwork because of the challenges of importing other, legally propagated species, into the U.S.

(via bOING bOING)

Overstruck Greek Coins

2009-10-04T13:21:00.002-04:00

David MacDonald, Overstruck Greek Coins (2009). 14+272 pages. List price $40.

This is a wonderful book! It's a good-quality hardcover. There is no dust jacket but the cover is glossy and full color. (What's the word for that?) Every page is glossy and in color. Each coin is shown enlarged in its section and illustrated again actual size on 22 plates at the end. 160 coins are discussed. The undertype is presenting by line drawings.

This review is a work-in-progress as I haven't finished the book.

Although this book is readable it's not intended for beginners. MacDonald doesn't waste a lot of space defining terms that you already know. It's also not a catalog. In the preface it's made clear that the book isn't even trying to list all commonly encountered overstrikes. It's unlikely but possible that catalogers will start including "MacDonald -" when selling overstricks.

This isn't a breathtaking coffee table book listing the highlights of Greek coin art. The coins are nicer than average grade, and often uglier than average. As MacDonald points out

Overstruck coins are usually ugly. They are not popular with most collectors and, consequently, are avoided by many dealers.

What makes this book wonderful is that the overstruck coins are used to jump into open questions on dating of ancient coins. MacDonald describes simply the currently accepted dating and why it might or must be wrong. He gives enough hints that I could follow the arguments without having to go look up stuff in other books. That's the real strength of this book. In a lot of journal-level numismatic writing the authors are writing towards other PhD classics professors which makes them hard to follow. This book is much smoother.

Because only 160 coins are discussed in nearly 300 pages there is enough room to give background on the coins. We get a lot more than whose on the front and a date range like "480-460". Each coin gets a quality discussion which tells us not just the the issue dates, but often tell us which expert proposed the dates and the historical events that begin or close the date range.

The presentation, with a line drawing of the visible part of the undertype and a photograph of the coin is new to me. It's a good way to present an overstruck coin. MacDonald only reveals the visible lines so there isn't much undertype to see if it is mostly obscured by the overstrike. I would have liked to have seen more undertype, maybe illustrated with dotted lines in grey to indicate that they were reconstructed. Not including those lines is probably more scientific though, because who wants to see reconstructed features that might just be imagination? It's incorrect to make up things in coin catalogs! Thus I think MacDonald chose the right format even if I want something else.

Note that the cover picture on this post, from Whitman's web site, isn't the cover of the actual book, although they are similar. The fake cover says 'Edited by' David MacDonald. The real cover shows those five coins and two more.

Images de la Gorgone

2009-10-03T20:54:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to write a book on ancient coins depicting Medusa. To do a good job I need to read the other books on the subject and they can be hard to get.

I was especially interested in Images de la Gorgone (1985) by Irène Aghion and Evelyne Veljovic. It documents a 1985 exhibition by the Cabinet des Médailles of the Bibliothèque Nationale. That's the French national coin collection. The book isn't held in any of the usual places in New York. The ANS doesn't have a copy, nor the New York Public Library, nor NYU, nor Columbia. The nearest library copy I could locate is at Harvard, three hours away by car. I've never seen copies for sale and I've checked numismatic, book and eBay dealers.

The University of Michigan has a copy. They have a great service, MITS, that will photocopy articles and send them for a fee. They refused to copy Images! They are bound by US law ... they will only copy 100-year-old documents or documents registered with the Copyright Clearance Center. (If I was in the library myself they wouldn't bar me from using the machines.)

Next I tried the British Library. Same story. They cannot copy the book for me.

Eventually I found the book's entry at the Bibliothèque Nationale itself. Unlike the UofM and the British Library, getting photocopies from the BnF is a pain. I had to open an account, by mail — not email — request the book by mail, and pay with a euro-denominated money order by mail. It took about six months and cost about $80.

I assume the BnF realized that since they are the publishers they didn't have to be bound by copyright law.

This was a lot of work to obtain a photocopy of a recent rare book with a list price of 40 francs (about $7). The text is quite readable. The plates of my photocopy are muddy and difficult to see. I have no clue how good the original plates are.

This book is an example of an “orphan work.” Although I believe the authors are still alive and working for the BnF I couldn't figure out how to email them and didn't have the resources to track them down for permission.

Google's deal to get orphan works from libraries to readers failed. Folks on both sides of the discussion are talking about what should be done but what I'm reading is generalities. When you think about how society should handle orphan works, it's worthwhile to think of some specific examples like Images de la Gorgone. Suppose Google collected money on behalf of Aghion, Veljovic, and the BnF. How much could they expect to receive? I'd guess in all the world there is about $200 worth of interest in this book. I was about $80 interested in it, I'd guess 3 or 4 other people are that interested, maybe a a couple of dozen would be interested at $10 a copy.

No scheme in the world is going to get more money into the hands of the copyright holders.

In tomorrow's New York Times Book Review Lewis Hyde suggests that letting Google take a cut of the money would be like letting an executor drain an estate. He thinks the court should appoint a guardians to look for rights holders.

There is no money in 99% of orphan works. Most orphans are only worth a few dozen copies. That's the problem Google is trying to solve for five million orphans. Google wants to give researchers legal access to read truely rare books. The books that librarians and dealers consider ‘rare’ are books that are valuable. Those are the books on closed shelves in major libraries. Truely rare books are a bit more rare than that.

Recently a friend gave me John Yonge Akerman's Fourrès and forgeries: general observations on the coins and coinage of the Romans (1970). WorldCat reports exactly one copy of this book known. It's in Eastern Kentucky University Library. That's a rare book! It's not particularly interesting; it's just plate 14 and pages v-xix from Akerman's A descriptive catalogue of rare and unedited Roman coins (1834) plus a new photo plate by the publishers.

Do you want to see that book? You will have to go to Kentucky.

Errol Morris on art forger Han van Meegeren

2009-10-02T09:23:00.004-04:00

I recently stumbled across Error Morris' seven-part essay on the artist and forger Han van Meegeren. He forged Vermeers in Nazi-occupied Netherlands.

Morris believes the false Vermeers were accepted not because of their resemblance to real Vermeers, but because they looked like a cross between Vermeers and the Nazi art of the day. Nothing about coins, but a bizarre story about how connoisseurs fool themselves.

...
The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like people. Slight discrepancies and incongruities between what we look like and what they look like disturb us. The closer a robot resembles a human, the more critical we become, the more sensitive to slight discrepancies, variations, imperfections. ... You would think a close copy would be the goal of a forger, but it might not be a smart way to go. If you were a brilliant technician it might be an acceptable strategy, but my forger, Van Meegeren, is not as good as that. So if he’s going to try to pass himself off as Vermeer, he isn’t going to do it by painting “The Girl With Two Pearl Earrings.”

... nobody ever did any scientific test on Van Meegeren, even the stuff that was available in his day, until after he confessed. And to this day, people hardly ever test pictures, even multi-million dollar ones. And I was so surprised by that that I kept asking, over and over again: why? Why would that be? Before you buy a house, you have someone go through it for termites and the rest. How could it be that when you’re going to lay out $10 million for a painting, you don’t test it beforehand? And the answer is that you don’t test it because, at the point of being about to buy it, you’re in love!

(via Cheap Talk)

Looking for treasure

2009-09-25T15:20:00.001-04:00

No coins, but the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was recently found in England. [New York Times]. NPR [audio + transcript].

... the discovery was not the outcome of a carefully planned archaeological enterprise, but the product of a lone amateur stumbling about with a metal detector.

Here in the US there aren't any Roman treasures to find with metal detectors. Or are there? In 1924 Charles Manier found two gigantic lead crosses with Roman-Jewish inscriptions outside Tucson Arizona. The crosses, swords, and other “Roman” relics were supposedly exhibited in Tucson in 2003 according to Western & Eastern Treasures magazine's copy of a story from the Tucson Citizen. However, the story doesn't show up in 2009 search of the Tucson paper's archives nor does it show up in current or archive.org searches of the Arizona State Museum's web site.

New York judge sinks Google reprint settlement

2009-09-25T11:10:00.001-04:00

Bobbie Johnson reports in today's Guardian, “Google Books deal postponed after avalanche of criticism”.

The judge overseeing Google's controversial agreement with American publishers to digitise millions of books has delayed a hearing into the $125m deal - effectively shutting down the settlement and sending it back to the drawing board.

The deal, if and when it happens, will allow Google to sell out-of-print in-copyright books that it doesn't have the rights to. The money would go into a lockbox that the copyright holders could get when they realize they own money-making orphan books.

The good news is that Google and On Demand Books have a partnership to print public domain titles in bookstores using the Espresso Book Machine. You'll be able to walk into bookstores (currently in San Francisco; New Orleans; Ann Arbor; Manchester Center, Vermont; and Provo, Utah) and for $8 walk out with a paperback book such as Catalog of the Greek coins of Phyrgia.

And look at that cover! I feel certain it was auto-generated. I may be the first human to have ever seen the cover of this numismatic book, when I opened the web site this morning. If the Espresso Book Machine ever makes it to New York I will be ready with many titles I'm willing to pay $8 for. If the Google deal had gone through many titles from the 20th century could have been available for just a little more.

Charles Davis mail bid sale October 17, 2009

2009-09-24T19:24:00.003-04:00

Charles Davis is holding a mail bid sale [PDF] October 17th. 691 lots. Many titles on British tokens. Lots 491-578 are titles on ancients and many of the ancients titles are useful catalogs: SNG volumes, Crawford on Roman Republican, RIC volumes etc.

The catalog gives the URL of Davis' (new?) site, http://www.charlesdavisnumismatics.com/ which, at the time of this writing, is merely a gallery of photographs of numismatic books and bindings.

I received a copy in the mail today.

Creepy talking Rhodes tetradrachm

2009-09-23T10:39:00.000-04:00

A creepy talking Rhodes tetradrachm urges you to shop for reproduction coin necklaces created by Boxing Pandora.

Another video of coin striking

2009-09-23T10:27:00.000-04:00

William Bjornson, Arion the Wanderer, and Ian Cnulle of the An Tir Moneyers Guild demonstrate striking a coin in the ancient Greek style and the 2009 ANA Money Show.

There is a Yahoo group for folks who re-enact ancient methods of coining.

Gregory Zorzos goes commercial

2009-09-19T07:56:00.005-04:00

Gregory Zorzos, whose strange ancient coin YouTube videos have been discussed before has gone commercial.

His videos Ancient coins from Bactriane and PICTURES OF BYZANTINE COINS
are available from Amazon.com as video on demand.

The price is $25 for a digital download that can be played on two computers. The Baktrian video can also be rented for seven days for $2. The first two minutes of the videos can be seen for free by following the links above.

Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980

2009-09-15T22:04:00.002-04:00

Charles Davis is offering a new book by John Spring, Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980. It's described as 374 pages, size A4 (roughly equivelent to 8.5x11).

If any readers have seen it please leave a comment letting us know what you think.

Wikipedia on fourrées

2009-08-25T20:37:00.004-04:00

Wikipedia's article on fourrées includes a section on modern fourrées which surprised me

The 1982 and later US one cent piece (Lincoln penny) is an example of a fourrée since it is zinc which has been plated with copper in a manner to deceive.

Nice! I hadn't thought about it that way before.

The image on this post is not from Wikipedia, but from my own collection of fourrées depicting Medusa. I bought this in 2003 and finally got around to scanning it. This one is from Rome, about 74 BC, with the name of the moneyer L. Cossutius C.f. Sabula. The numeral on the back, XXII I think for mine, is for the die; Michael Crawford says “The control-marks are the numerals from I to XXXXII; no control-numeral has more than one die.” I would be interested to see other XXII issues to see if they are in similar style to this fourrée.

Ancient silver coins in Uttar Pradesh

2009-08-20T11:08:00.002-04:00

Thaindian News reports (no byline)

Lucknow, Aug 20 (IANS) Nearly 68 kg of ancient silver coins dating back to 1861 and 1892 were recovered from three men who were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi district, police said Thursday.
Rajesh Singh, Aditya Sharan and Mukesh Mishra were nabbed Wednesday night from Chetganj locality of Varanasi, about 250 km from here.

...

According to police, the coins carry symbols of Queen Victoria and King George V of Britain.

“We will hand over the coins to the archaeological department for evaluation,” said Rai.

How can this hoard date back to 1861 and 1892? Shouldn't it be one or the other?

Ukrainian detained for attempting to smuggle ancient coin into Ukraine

2009-08-17T08:17:00.002-04:00

“Ukrainian detained for attempting to smuggle ancient coin into Ukraine” reports the Kyiv Post (no byline).

The press service of the Crimean customs service reported on Wednesday that a copper coin had been found in his wallet at the Kerch customs post.

According to preliminary reports, this is a coin from Panticapaeum dates (sic) to around 314-310 BC.

The illustration depicts not an ancient coin, but twelve old coins, mostly British pence with the reverse used in the 19th and 20th centuries.