Valcambi, a Swiss refinery, has an interesting new concept in gold bullion and in coinage.

They are marketing a CombiBar, a credit-card sized gold ingot that can easily be broken into 1g pieces to make change.

Teaming up with the Cook Islands, they have produced two varieties of CombiCoin, one that breaks into pure silver 1g coins denominated as Cook Island dimes, another that breaks into 10g pieces. The silver bars can be purchased for about $150.

Two more BMC Greek titles online

Sir George Hill's 1910 Catalogue of the Greek coins of Phoenicia and 1914 Catalogue of the Greek coins of Palestine are both available online in a searchable format through HathiTrust Digital Library. They can also be purchased on Amazon, in paperback replica format, for about $40 each.

Cleaning an ancient Roman coin with a steel scalpel

I had never seen scalpel cleaning. I was surprised by the uniform shortness of the blade strokes. The video is ten minutes long. Two minutes in they speed up the process 5x. At five minutes in they go back a montages of different coins.

Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Lycaonia, Isauria, and Cilicia

George Hill's 1900 Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Lycaonia, Isauria, and Cilicia is finally available for download at Google Books. It can also be printed on demand, for as little as $9.92. The plates seem much better in quality on the PDF than Google's web site, although on both the plates are cropped at the top and bottom.