Revue numismatique online (1958-2003)

Lee Toone reports that the 1958-2003 volumes of Revue Numismatique are online at http://www.persee.fr/.

The site is searchable by article title, and Moneta has direct links to all of the volumes. Individual articles can be read online or downloaded.

There seems to be some problem with the plates. The titles of the plates are available, but where the coins should be is a tiny picture of a lock. The PDF downloads for the plates claim to be large (40+ MB) but upon downloading are small (3 MB) and contain the same glyph of a lock where the coins should be.

Bulletin de correspondance hellénique is also available from Persee.

For older volumes, Google Books has three 19th century volumes.

I don't know much about Persee. It claims to be in beta. It has an icon for English-language access. It seems to be from the Ministry of State for Higher Education and Research.

Replica half shekels from Charles Larson

Charles Larson wrote Numismatic Forgery (Zyrus Press, 2004), a very detailed book on techniques of making fake dies and using them to make coins.

This book is so good that the ANA used the manuscript in their forgery class, then pulled the book from usage after realizing how technical it is. Imagine traveling all the way to Colorado for a counterfeit detection class whose teachers didn't think you needed to see the most explicit books! I don't know how much these classes cost but the ANA is offering one in November at the Illinois coin show and tuitition is $445.

Larson's book is easily found everywhere now for $15-20.

I was wondering what Larson was up to. His web site is down, but the Internet Archive keeps part of an older version. I found that he's teamed up with Temple Mount Center in Jerusalem and is striking shekels and half shekels in silver and gold. The catalog of shekel replicas is online.

I still meet people who haven't read Numismatic Forgery. Here is what I wrote in 2004:

Covers: Alteration (tooling, adding mint marks); Casting (centrifugal); False Dies (engraving tools, from electroplates, from casts, explosive impact); Collars; Planchets; Striking (hammering jigs and the 'gravity hammer'); and Wear/Patina.

Although written in the style of a "how-to" manual for replica and clandestine workshops, the book's target audience is collectors and authenticators. To employ Mr. Larson's techniques for crime you'd need to know the basics of precious metal casting, tool and die machining, gunsmithing, and numismatics. For readers without a metal lathe but with a serious interest in authentication and forgery-fighting, the book will provide an understanding of the covert minting process.

I was most impressed by Larson's treatment of the manufacture of steel dies through explosive impact copying. His procedure involves modifying shotguns to drive cast hubs into annealed dies. Larson's diagrams are explicit enough to convince the numismatist that explosive copying is practical. Details only of use to criminals, such as the type and quantity of gunpowder to use, are deliberately withheld from the reader.

Larson quotes an anonymous authenticator who examined 114 1916-S quarter eagles during the 1980s. 56% of them turned out to be fake! Hi-volume forgers in the Middle East and the Orient already know many of Larson's techniques. Numismatic Forgery may provide a few useful tips to jewelers and machinists independently turning to crime, but the primary value of the book is to educate collectors in the characteristics of the illicit workshop.

Microsoft winding down book search

A Microsoft blog announces their digitization efforts are winding down.

If you haven't visited Microsoft's book search site, there were a number of downloadable numismatic books not on Google. They also provided a good searchable interface for the books at the Internet Archive.

(via TeleRead).

ANA magazine online

The Numismatist is going online. For several years selected articles have appeared online in PDF format. Now entire issues are available. The first two issues are available to all, but in the future they will restrict access to members-only.

May 2008
June 2008

Access is through a creepy "drag to turn the page" metaphor.

I don't like the format. It's Shockwave Flash. Visually it's amazing. As a researcher, I'd like the ability to copy paragraphs and paste them into an email or article. I'd like the ability to link directly to an article instead of the whole issue.

Quinquies

We've previously dicussed the symbol Eckhel used meaning the 'reverse' of a coin. I've found a new candidate for it in Joannes Dominicus Coletius' Notae et siglae quae in nummis et lapididus apud Romanos obtinebant explicatae [= Mark and sigils upon money and stone according to Roman explanation] (1785).

Coletius' list, which spans pages 421-445, includes symbols like the Roman Denarius Sign and Roman Sestertius Sign, recently added to Unicode in the Ancient Symbols page at code points 10196 and 10198 along with bizarre symbols I've never encountered.

The first symbol on the top of page 439 looks a great deal like the version Eckhel's printer used. Coletius explains it as 'Quinquies'. This word is aparently the 'numerical adverb' for the number 5 ('quinque'). Oddly, although Google believes there are 423,000 web pages with 'quinquies' but it is missing on most online dictionaries of Latin.

If this is the symbol, it remains unexplained why the symbol for '5' would be a good choice for the reverse of a coin, or where the practice of using it started.

Ancient Coin Collectors Guild receives documents on coin imports

You may remember that the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild is suing the US Government for information on how regulations for importing coins into the US are created.

The Guild has received 34 documents from the US state department and an initial summary has been posted.

(via Peter Tompa's blog Cultural Property Observer)

American Journal of Numismatics

Google is starting to make available copies the American Journal of Numismatics (first series). The originals are coming from Harvard's collection.

July 1870-July 1871 vol. V
July 1872 vol. VII
July 1874-July 1875 vol IX
July 1876-July 1877 vol XI
July 1882-July 1883 vol. XVII
July 1886-July 1887 vol XXI
July 1888, vol XXIII
July 1890-July 1891 vol. XXV
July 1894-July 1895 vol XXIX
July 1896-July(April?) 1897 vol XXXI
July 1902-April 1903 vol XXXVII
July 1906-April 1907 vol XLI
1917 vol LI

NBS, NL

The May 4th issue of the e-Sylum mentions my blog entry on the Wikipedia numismatics portal.

I started cleaning up a few Wikipedia entries but I don't want to get involved in a new project. I did notice that Exonumia, Notaphily, and Scripophily get Wikipedia articles as subfields. Numismatic Books are not even mentioned. Anyone arriving from the e-Sylum who wants to get started might consider creating the article on coin books.

An NBS questionaire arrived in the mail this week asking me to rank, from 1..100, the greatest works on American Numismatics, from a list of many pages. I lack the expertise to fill it out but it's an interesting idea.

One work on the list which I do greatly admire is the American Numismatic Society's Numismatic Literature. I'd give it #1. They have been publishing it since 1947. Some back issues can be searched online using http://64.81.216.220/cgi-bin/nlsearch.

I have multiple copies from the '70s and '80s because I bought a huge dealer lot at a CNG auction. (Email me if you want an issue or partial series for free.) (I thought I was getting a good deal from CNG at $1/copy, but then at the ANS book sale copies were being offered for free and not being taken.)

How do folks compare a 100+ issue ongoing series with a single auction catalog or short book?

Civil War cannonball kills Virginia relic collector

Civil War cannonball kills Virginia relic collector by Steve Szkotak (AP).

People, be careful out there!

Online index to the Prokopov forgery series

Ilya Prokopov has a series of books on modern forgeries of ancient coins. He puts out a new book every year with the new fakes he finds.

SP-P Publishing House has created an index of the books. It is available online on the front page. The index is provided as Microsoft Excel in addition to PDF. The Excel version lets you do spreadsheet things like sort by column.

Readers not familiar with Prokopov's work can see a sample from his forthcoming book New Fake Coin Hoards on NumisWiki. These fakes are interesting because the surfaces simulate intergranular corrosion. Until recently no one knew how to fake such surfaces.

Lake Books sale 93

The upcoming Lake Books sale #93 includes a decent library of standard references on Greek and Roman coins. Consignment E has 128 lots on ancients, including Hardbound Lindgren I, The Asyut Hoard estimated at $35, SNG Levante, SNG Copenhagen, and a Rosen Collection estimated at $35. Consignment L is a complete set of the Forni reprint of BMC Greek (29 volumes as one lot).

Closes May 29, 2008.

Wikipedia

In July 2007 The Celator banned references to Wikipedia in articles. The magazine printed several letters to the editor commending him for the ban. I disagreed but did not write a letter.

Wikipedia is still free to discuss The Celator and now does thanks to an article I just created.

The Celator banned Wikipedia references because of errors in historical content. I've found Wikipedia to be a good start at information that I later check elsewhere. Rather than discussing Wikipedia's historical coverage I'd like to point out its numismatic coverage.

Wikipedia has always had articles on numismatic topics. It now has a Numismatics WikiProject and a Numismatics Portal. The portal is a 'face' that presents Wikipedia content organized for numismatic purposes. The project is an effort to coordinate folks improving numismatic articles and the portal. The 'current collaboration' is to improve the Ancient Greek Coinage article.

Wikipedia has almost no coverage of numismatic literature. There is a Numismatics Journals category with just seven entries. A few books, like The Red Book have Wikipedia entries but there is no 'Numismatic Book' category to gather them together.

New Asylum

A new issue (vol. 26 #1) of The Asylum arrived this week. Cover story is “The Martin Luther Beistle Book on Half Dollars” by Bill Bugert. There is only one other article: “A Proposed Concise Library of Sales Needed for All United States Coins since 1793” by P. Scott Rubin. There are two book reviews, one for the novel The Coin Collectors and one for The Hibernia Coinage of William Wood (1722-1724).

It's a short issues. John W. Adams urges readers to submit more articles.

I've been thinking of writing an article on odd numismatic symbols and monograms based on blog entries here. I am trying to decide if I should write it now or wait until I have researched )( further. (Now that the ANS library is closed for the move it will be unlikely that I'll be able to research it soon.) Another possibility a completely different article related to digitization.

Bleg - printing PDFs

I wish to buy printed and bound copies of a few 18th century works available on Google books.

Google lets me download PDFs. I could take the downloaded PDFs to a copy place for printing and putting into a folder. I'd like something a little nicer than a binder. Are there any online services that allow me to upload a PDF and send me a book-sized object.

Perhaps I wouldn't even need to upload the PDF... I'd like a web form allowing me to submit the Google URL, book dimensions, and credit card number. The service would print and bind a hardcover and mail it to me.

[See wiktionary.org for the definition of bleg]

Sued for $10000 because of neutral eBay feedback on some Morgan dollars

King5.com story: “Get Jesse: Sued for 'OK' eBay feedback” by Jesse Jones.

...
Shellhorn bought some Morgan silver dollars from a man in North Carolina. The price was fair, but Shellhorn says the coins were packed poorly.

"The coins were hanging out of the envelope, loose, with no packing whatsoever around them," he said.

The seller wanted feedback. Shellhorn couldn't honestly say the deal was good or bad so he took the middle ground.

"This is neutral feedback, not even negative feedback, but neutral. He sued me for $10,000," he said.
...

Colosseum Coin Exchange auction #2

The catalog for Colosseum Coin Exchange auction #2 is up. 110 lots of ancient coins. 14 numismatic books and a few antiquities. Closes May 6th.

Rauch auction 82 this week

H. D. Rauch auction 82 happens this week. 723 lots of ancients.

There are also 46 lots of numismatic literature. It is easy to miss them in the online catalog, which puts them with the RÖMISCH DEUTSCHES REICH. I'm not bidding, but if I was, it would be for Barbar Penzei, Count Dessewffy's work on “barbaric” imitations of Greek coins.

I'd love to put a scan of the Barbar Penzei plates online, so if the winner is a reader of this blog....

The Rauch says there are 54 plates, as does Clain-Stefanelli and the ANS library catalog. The Malter library auction catalog says 32 plates. A copy at Douglas Saville Numismatic Books says 44 plates. (I only stumbled onto Saville's site searching for this book. I have not dealt with him.)

Although Rauch is starting Barbar Penzei at 100 euros the Malter estimate was $875 and it realized $700.

What interests me in the Count's book is that it features Celtic imitations of Greek types. I don't know of more recent books on that topic. If my readers know of any, please let me know in the comments section.

Book scanning and _Ten Thousand Cents_

Mark Tomasko writes, in the April 13 2008 e-Sylum, that he “hopes the '$150,000 digitizing machine' never shows up at the ANA library.” He feels that many institutions would destroy their originals if presented with a copy.

Mr. Tomasko is correct to feel that way. Every bibliophile who wants a good horror show should read Nicholson Baker's Double Fold. It turns out that for the past thirty years libraries have been microfilming and throwing away the originals. (Occasionaliy they sell them instead). The microfilms are often bad -- misaligned, underexposed, overexposed. They are black and white for color originals.

Digitizations such as Googles are a lot better in quality. The stuff you see on Google's web site is greatly reduced from the scans Google makes. (They are still filled with mis-scans, fold-out-plates that aren't folded out, etc.) Don't blame 'digitization' for something that has been going on for decades.

I really doubt the ANA would throw away originals after scanning. It's the public-funded, underfunded, public libraries that want to clear out space for the things they think today's taxpayers want.

Numismatics, especially ancient numismatics, whose key works are scarce or rare and out-of-print, has a problem unless the material becomes available. Works on ancient coins also tend to be in a foreign language.

Visit Google Book Search and look at a book. The public domain books now have a feature 'View Plain Text' that provides access to the OCRed text. Currently it isn't very good, but suppose it got better. It's very hand to copy text and paste it into Google Language Tools and translate it into any language.

It's kind of painful to do this. Currently the translations aren't very good. Google could easily make this much easier, by linking the two existing services together. They already do this for Google Talk chatting service.

What about quality? It's poor now, especially for numismatic texts. The reason it's poor is that Google uses a statistical translator algorithm trained from a small set of bilingual newspaper articles. It's going to get better. To understand how this works, check out an hour-long video presentation Theorizing from Data by Peter Norvig.

I predict that Google will develop software to let the public help with fixing OCR and translation glitches, if they haven't already. It's possible that folks will do this for free, but Norvig suggests they could be paid. There is already software that lets people, especially cheap offshore labor, work on large collaborative projects. This brings us to Ten Thousands Cents.

Ten Thousand Cents is a ‘conceptual art’ counterfeiting experiment. Artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima used Amazon.com's “Mechanical Turk” web site to hire people to draw 10,000 pictures from what appeared to be abstract photographs.

The drawings, when assembled, reveal a US $100 bill. The artists are selling prints of the art piece for $100. The ‘prints’ are one-sided counterfeit hand-drawn $100 bills. The web site has more details and a two-minute video.

So imagine a future where teenagers and retirees are earning minimum wage helping Google's translation algorithms, where any book written before 1921 is available in any language. Imagine Google's high-resolution scanners getting to books before libraries de-accession the works anyway because a poor-quality microfilm that no human has ever looked at exists in a basement in Michigan.

Who wrote SNG Fitzwilliam?

(answer below... this isn't a real quiz)

I've been trying to write something about the gorgon/EEE fractions of Tegea. SNG Fitzwilliam, which I don't have, dates them to 370 - 300 BC. That date range is odd... it isn't the date range used by the Gardener (BMC), Head (Historia Numorum), Babelon (Traité), and nothing that I know of happened in Tegea in 370 BC.

I wanted to write “so-and-so assigns these to 370-300 BC” and cite SNG Fitzwilliam. I realized I didn't know who edited the six volumes (called parts) that make up SNG Fitzwilliam.

To get the author's name I went to the official SNG site, sylloge-nummorum-graecorum.org, which gave me the dates of publication but not the author.

I went to the American Numismatic Society library search, but couldn't find the entry! At all! I'm pretty sure I've read SNG Fitzwilliam at the library, but the online catalog is missing the entry or using an 'alternate spelling'.

Reid Goldsborough has a nice SNG page, but he doesn't list authors.

I am usually good with computers but this one stumped me! I switched to traditional sources, beginning with Clain-Stefanelli's massive 1848 page tome Numismatic Bibliography. Page 148 is devoted to British SNGs but authors are not listed for parts 1-5 of Fitzwilliam. (Authors are given for parts 6-8). No authors are they listed in Daehn Ancient Greek Numismatics: A Guide to Reading and Research. Kroh lists some SNG authors, but not for Fitzwilliam.

Back online, I checked some other large online catalogs (Harvard, NYU, NYPL) but couldn't even find entries for SNG Fitzwilliam. It isn't clear if these libraries lack it. It may merely be hard to find. The British Academy really threw a wrench at librarians by giving the whole series one title. The title includes the word 'Nummorum' which is often misspelled. The volumes have their own names (Fitzwilliam, British Museum, Lockett etc.) and each volume consists of multiple books which would be called volumes but are called 'parts'.

Eventually I thought of checking the numismatic library at the Fitzwilliam itself.

I found entries there for part 1 (or 1-5?), 6, 7, and 8. The author given for parts 1-5 is F. Heichelheim.

It's surprising that so many printed sources neglect to mention SNG author/editors. Is it part of the culture to pretend the volumes write themselves, or are done by loose supervision of anonymous graduate students? Even with the name Heichelheim I found little online.

(The ANS library catalog offered the article “Fritz Moritz Heichelheim and the Fitzwilliam Coin Cabinet” in Hekte volume 2 (1996). I'd never heard of Hekte. The title is hard to search for on Google because it is a common numismatic term (describing an electrum 1/6 stater). The Fitzwilliam library numismatic periodicals web page tells me it's a Canadian journal, and since they haven't received a copy in ten years it's probably defunct. Google Books says it was published by Aureus Investments Gallery. That name no longer appears in the Toronto phone book.)

Thoughts on digitization

This week's e-Sylum discusses digitization of numismatic literature. Wayne Homren asks if digitization will be a 'Godsend or Gomorrah'. Wayne is concerned that digitization may harm the value of private libraries. That's true if the perceived value of works is the value of the information contained within. Some coin collectors feel that way. (I feel that way.) Non-numismatic book collectors seem to feel otherwise. I see mad prices for first editions of Harry Potter ($10,000+!!!) and Hemingway even though modern editions have better type, better paper, etc.

I digitized Barclay Head's Historia Numorum. I suspect my action decreased the value of the reprints and increased the value of the best (1911) printing. That effect may be small. A bigger economic effect should be the result of the increased profile of the thousands of works cited therein. Historia Numorum often directs the reader to key papers in rare 19th century works. Those citations infect specialist collectors with a desire to read (and own) key works in their speciality.

If your collection is merely reprints of pre-1922 works I expect it's value to drop to $0.

Digitization may increase your enjoyment of the books you already own. I own a few rare 19th century editions of BMC Greek. When I open them, they make cracking sounds. Paper fragments fall off. I enjoy the fine plates, far superior to the reprint, but for reference I prefer to use Google Books to access them. Being able to 'Google' your own library is an underrated experience!

I was able to add a little value to Historia Numorum by adding hyperlinks. When Google gets more works scanned I will be able to hyperlink everything cited, in bulk. This will make the electronic version much more useful than the best paper edition. I have no idea if this will help or hurt the economic value of the first printing.

More important is the effects of digitization on the authoring of new works. Numismatics, especially ancient numismatics, is built upon the study of individual coins. The chronology comes from overstrikes and die links. To improve on the works of predecessors we must understand earlier works.

That isn't the case with, say, 'physics.' Physics is built up from a small number of key equations based on experiments that could be repeated today. Those experiments, along with the names of their discoverers, is all that is needed to write about physics. Coins are different. I can't just take a shovel and dig the restrikes and die links needed to rebuild the chronologies. It is considered bad form to propose new theories and new attributions for coins without reading earlier works. Easy digital access to the works that numismatics is built upon will allow more amateurs to theorize and write new works.