Very Low Cost Antiquities Registries

Peter Tompa asked me about my ideas for using a non-governmental nearly free web site to register ancient coins.

Collectors sometimes need to prove they owned a coin before a certain date. For example, before a law was passed requiring special paperwork for acquisitions, or before a similar coin was was stolen.

There are several traditional ways to prove ownership by a certain date. One way to prove you had a coin (or picture of a coin) at a certain date is to print a picture of it in a book or catalog and get a lot of copies of the book into libraries around the world. This is very expensive!

Another way is to take a picture of the coin and have a Notary Public notarize it. I have known some dubious Notaries and I'm not sure this is a good idea.

Another way to prove a coin existed is to submit it for slabbing to NGC or ICG. The slabbing authority puts the coin in a uniquely numbered holder. The slabbing authority keeps a picture of the coin, knows when they took the picture, and it's probably considered a trusted third party by the US court system. This costs about $20. Whether $20 is cheap or not depends on the coin. There is a lot of human labor involved in sending the coin in and getting it back.

How can we reduce the time and expense of registering coins to nearly instant and nearly free?

I propose creating proof (of access to) a coin using software like that from e-TimeStamp. The idea is that the owner takes a digital picture of the coin and uses the site to 'time stamp' the image file. This costs 40 cents (and there are volume discounts).

According the the companies web site the IETF standard for time stamps and the DigiStamp process do comply with the Uniform Rules of Evidence Code. In the United States, the general admissibility of electronic records is well established, provided authenticity can be proven. There is a lot of legal and technical information on the site.

Forty cents per image might be high to certify one side of a coin but remember that you can stitch together thousands of coin images into a single large image and stamp it all at once so the price is essentially free in quantity.

It should be possible for a collectors organization to link the e-TimeStamp software to a web site allowing online submissions of photos to certify. e-TimeStamp also sells a machine for $30,000. Perhaps such a machine could be combined with a camera and some trustworthy guards that would certify that the coins were physically present near the machine and not pictures of coins still in other countries.

I have no business relationship with e-TimeStamp — I've never even used their service. I just think it is a neat idea and may solve complaints that registries of ancient coins must be expensive to operate and must involve governmental bodies.

There is no need to depend on a single company such as e-TimeStamp. The technology is based on public key cryptography. There are various proposals (like RFC 3029) for letting anyone do such things, and there are US patents on public-key date/time notary software systems that explain how to do it.

For safety reasons collectors' organizations should work with a company that has been around for years and claims (as e-TimeStamp does) that they are unable to fake their own certificates even for a million dollars rather than attempting to recreate a system whose legal authority rests on being flawless!

Pacific island nation finds minting coins too difficult, returns to dolphin-tooth standard

I don't know how I missed this important story.

A story by Richard Giedroyc in World Coin News reveals that the Solomon Islands [wikipedia] is informally returning to the practice of using dolphin teeth for spare change (as previously reported by a story by Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal.)

The reason? “The Central Bank of Solomon Islands has called on citizens of the island nation to cash in their coins.... Part of the problem, according to the [Australian Broadcasting Corporation], is that 'The low value of coins in Solomon Islands' currency has led many there to either hoard them, or to give them as gifts to children.' [Radio New Zealand] added, 'However, the number of people doing this is starting to affect businesses.'”

List of Subject Headings for Specialized Collections in Numismatics

A recent e-Sylum summarizes Rick Witschonke's “Frank Campbell: An Appreciation of Five Decades of Service”. The summary mentions Frank Cambell's Subject Heading List; the full article says the List “ultimately contained nearly 20,000 items.”

I've never seen the List. The ANS card catalog entry reveals it was seven pages long and published in the 11th International Congress of Numismatics.

Perhaps I'm missing something. How can 20,000 items be printed on seven pages? Do 20,000 “items” correspond to 20,000 headings? The Library of Congress sells a five volume set of all their headings in every subject — there are 280,000 in total, for all knowledge in the world. So 20,000 seems high for Numismatics. I'm merely guessing though. I'm not even quite sure what a subject heading is, although this Wikipedia page tries to explain it.

The Library of Congress also has a classification system. Coins are in CJ.

1-4625 Coins

153 Finds of coins
161 Symbols, devices, etc.
201-1397 Ancient
1509-4625 Medieval and modern

To get more information about this range one apparently has to subscribe to Classification Web for $325.

Not all books on coins are in CJ. The Library's Numismatics and Philately page points out, for example, that a book listing all coins and banknotes of a country will be found under HG.

Google Book Search Targeting More Books for Public Domain?

Information Today article by Barbara Quint on US copyright renewal, 1923-1963, and Google's new free 390MB database of copyright renewals.

Spink on YouTube

English coin auctioneers Spink are uploading numismatic auction promotional videos to YouTube.



Unlike a lot of YouTube coin videos, the coins are well-photographed and scroll in interesting ways. YouTube's compression is still irritating, but at least these coins aren't blurry saturated blobs.

The video is narrated by Richard Bishop and William MacKay.

Abbreviations of book and journal titles

I often have difficulty upon encountering the abbreviated titles of obscure numismatic sources. Google Book Search doesn't know the 'obvious' abbreviations.

Yesterday I spent time looking up “Lenormant, Rois Grecs”, a citation in a book by Imhoof-Blumer. Eventually I realized the title refers to a volume, Numismatique complète des Rois Grecs (1849), in the 13-volume work Trésor de numismatique et de glyptique ou Recueil général de médailles, monnaies pierres gravées, bas-reliefs, etc. (1834-).

Using Google Book Search, Google, and the ANS library catalog in different windows helps.

For modern journal titles, the Harry Bass foundation has a list of the full titles of 930 numismatic journals and the abbreviations used by the Numismatic Literature journal.

Elsen list 245 up

Jean Elsen's list 245 is up, with 250 ancient coins. 50 lots of numismatic literature are promised to be added to the list by July 8th.

The Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum

In San Jose there is an “Egyptian” museum run by the Rosicrucian Order, a fraternal organization.

I visited five years ago. The museum is full of replicas.

The museum's faq assures the visitor that “there are less than 20 [replicas] in a display of over 3,000 authentic artifacts“. It seemed like there were a lot more. The museum's biggest display is a gigantic replica tomb. It's cool. I would have loved it when I was 10. Because it's a replica it's easier to touch than the real tombs in New York's Metropolitan Museum.

The building itself is in a faux Egyptian style (picture here) surrounded by cement bulls and hippos and replica Roman statues. The museum seemed very proud of its replicas, boasting of one bust that it was one of only three copies of the original in Berlin!

(The coin display is not good. I recall only two coins plus a glass weight described as a coin.)

I often think about the Rosecrucian Egyptian Museum when I read that countries want their better antiquities back.

The Rosecrucian Museum is perhaps educational for children and the general public. There is nothing wrong with having a museum with small genuine antiquities and large replicas. Egyptian-revival sculture gardens are cool. It's possible to have museums without many antiquities.

Something puzzles me about the Cultural Property rights debate. US and European museum collections are heavy in antiquities from other places. Why don't Cairo, Athens and Rome have museum wings full of American Indian arrowheads, Shaker furniture, and classic Detroit automobiles? If such museums opened up there would they be visited?

Why I'm not posting much lately

My daughter was born last weekend. I am a new father! It is taking a lot of time to take care of my wife and daughter.

Why you should throw books out

Economist Tyler Cowen explains why throwing out books is good for society.

425 plastic packing crates filled with treasures

Glenn Collins reports for The New York Times on the ANS's move.

“... one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault...”

“... New York police detective, Gregory Welch, of Emergency Service Unit Truck One... shadowed the move with hidden heavy weapons 'just in case,' along with patrol cars...”

“... For long stretches, the only sounds were the popping of tape and bubble wrap, the squawk of trays sliding into cabinets and the very occasional ring of a coin bouncing on the concrete floor ...”

On Rarity

June's The Celator includes an interesting article “Defining Rarity” by Arthur Houghton and David Hendin.

The authors propose five levels of rarity: Common, Scarce, Rare, Very Rare, and Extremely Rare.

The authors attempt to map each level onto it's frequency of appearance on the market. Unfortunately, their frequencies are similar but not identical for different series! Thus a Scarce Seleucid coin appears on the market ‘once every few months’ but a Scarce Ancient Jewish coin appears ‘on a fairly regular basis’. A Rare Seleucid coin appears ‘several times a year’, but a Rare Jewish coin ‘once or twice a year’.

If Houghton and Hendin could agree on the frequencies implied by their terms their scale would be much improved.

The authors give rough estimates for the number of examples for each sub-field, in both precious metals and bronze. For example a ‘rare’ Seleucid bronze should have 10-30 known specimens, while a rare Jewish silver coin has 25-75 examples. There is no contradiction here. A rarity scale useful for collectors should rank based on market appearances rather than surviving specimens.

Also missing in the article is an acknowledgment of overlap or fuzziness in the categories. A Very Rare type might appear three times in the same year because of a statistical fluke, and a merely Rare coin might not show up for five years.

Market availability has a lot to do with dealer optimism. Some scarce types appear common because a few dealers have G or VG condition specimens on their web sites at 5x market value.

Valuable coins also appear more common than they really are. Hendin acknowledges this in his frequency for Scarce, but market price seems to be an additional factor. A $15,000 coin with 10 known specimens seems to appear on the market more often than a $150 coin with 10 known specimens.

Because of such factors I'd prefer to see overlap in the estimates of known examples. For example, instead of Hendin's Extremely Rare=1-3 examples, Very Rare=4-25, and Rare=25-75 I'd like to see Extremely Rare=1-10 examples, Very Rare=5-50, and Rare=25-100.

Houghton and Hendin don't define the term 'market'. I tend to think of the term 'market' to mean the coins I see, online at VCoins/MA-Shops/SixBid/eBay, in glossy catalogs and walking the floor at NYINC. I don't know what fraction of the coin market I'm not seeing. I'm not seeing the uncleaneds, coins in shops, or in European coin shows. Because Houghton is known as the top Seleucid guy it's likely he gets offers of a lot of rare coins the rest of us don't see. His table suggests that “one or more“ examples appear on the market, over a few years, for types of Seleucid bronze with 2-10 extant specimens. Maybe that is what top collectors and dealers see. I'd expect a type with 2-10 specimens to appear in the markets I see less than once a decade.

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.

Coin photography under different lighting conditions

Voz has posted two denarius photos on ancients.info. The coins look like before-and-after-cleaning shots, but they are actually of the same coin, taken on the same day, under different lighting conditions.

ISEGRIM

I've written about ISEGRIM before. Now 'archivum' on FORVM has written Really Working with ISEGRIM. Worth reading!

Uncleaned coins, gold found

Derrick Fretwell has found two gold solidi of Carausius (286 AD). One is apparently unique.

ThisIsDerbyshire.co.uk has the details: “They are just the 24th and 25th gold coins from his reign that have ever been found, the last discovery being in 1975.”

Contextual Numismatics!

Wayne Sayles' recently blogged criticism of Nathan Elkins 2009 AIA panel on Contextual Numismatics in response to Elkin's call for papers on Contextual Numismatics.

Wayne has never heard of 'Contextual Numismatics', and neither has Google (regular or Book Search).

I also couldn't find anything on 'contextual numismatics' but given that this is an AIA conference I assume the phrase means applying the principals of contextual archaeology to numismatics. 'Contextual Archaeology' gets 2700 Google web hits and more importantly 306 hits on Google Book Search.

A History of Archaeological Thought by Bruce G. Trigger explains (p. 348) that Ian Hodder's contextual archaeology is a challenge to processual archaeology. “Basic to contextualism is Hodder's enthographically well-documented claim that material culture is not merely a reflection of ecological adaption or sociopolitical organization but also an active element in group relations that can be used to disguise as well as reflect social relations.”

Ian Hodder himself says (Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology, p. 156) “New developments in Marxist-influenced archaeology and social theory have lead to a more complete discussion of the role of agency in society, and a consideration of embodiment helps us understand how agents experience the world and hose they are formed as subjects in the world.”

As an outsider I can't make much of that!

Elkins seems to be bringing a message to archaeologists that coins should be studied as more than art objects or datable material objects. He wants to discuss what the ancients were consciously and unconsciously thinking about coins, using the genre techniques of anthropology, psychology, sociology, and maybe literary criticism.

Some numismatists study coins this way. For example, I've been thinking a lot lately about why many Greek cities used Medusa, a hideous monster, on their coinage. A search for 'propaganda' in the ANS library catalog gives 321 hits, mostly papers speculating on the meanings of images on ancient coinage. It is reasonable to want to gather cultural speculations on coins under an academic umbrella and encourage students to make it their field.

I think it would be great if anthropologists and psychologists started writing books on numismatic iconography (both ancient and modern.)

Elkin's use of the phrase 'critical study', and the highly academic vocabulary of the Call For Papers suggest he wants to encourage authors from the humanities. I wish Contextual Numismatics success as a sub-field but hope that its adherents encourage a style of writing accessible to numismatists and undergraduates. I find the language used by literary folks hard to understand. The stuff I read on Contextual Archaeology this morning called to mind a famous somewhat-satirical essay How to Deconstruct Almost Anything by Chip Morningstar. Morningstar makes the point that academics in the humanities write for each other, not for general audiences.

Recipe for convincing fake gold bars

Theo Gray tells PopSci.com How to make convincing fake-gold bars. He's never actually done it. He believes his recipe is more difficult to detect than the fake gold bars in Ethiopia's central bank.

(Anyone interested in gold bars should visit the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Reservations are required to be let into the gold vault. If you don't have reservations it's still worth a visit for the ANS coin exhibits. Visitors receive some odd numismatic-related publications, like these free comic books.)

Greatest comic book collection

(via boingboing)

Comic book dealer Chuck Rozanski has written a 17-part series on his 1977 purchase of the greatest collection of golden age comic books. He essentially rescued them from the collector's heirs who threw away some and would have thrown away the rest.

This tale has nothing to do with coins, computers, or numismatic literature. I am bringing it to your attention because it has a lot of insights about collecting, dealing collectables, and what your heirs are going to do to your collection. One amusing tidbit is that Mr. Rozanski was aparently the first person to realize that mint condition comic books from the 1930s, perhaps finest known example and unique in mint, were worth more than 2x the price well-used copy. He started charging 4x or 5x the price of a reading copy. Many collectors hated him for it and he lost friends over it.

New online article by Prokopov

Steel Matrixes from 'Demitrovgrad Studio' on FORVM Ancient Coins website.

Coin Forgeries and Replicas 2006 by Ilya Prokopov

Published in 2007, in Bulgaria, text in English. $20 + $8 shipping from SP-P Publishing House.

78 pages on good paper. The photographs are good quality and many are enlarged.

• 41 Greek coins (3 AE, 4 gold, the rest silver)
  +110 Histiaia tetrobols
  
• 1 Celtic imitation of Phillip II
  
• 2 Roman Republican (1 gold)
  
• 25 Roman coins (6 AE, 9 gold, 10 silver)
  
• 2 Byzantine coins
  
• 17 'Mandev studio' coins (8 Greek, 1 Bosporos kingdom, 7 Roman, 1 medieval)
  
• 6 antiquities

The six page Introduction mostly describes large pseudo-hoards of fake tetradrachms and Republican denarii arriving on the market. (These hoards aren't in this book.) There are three pages on the Mandev studio. The rest of the book is a catalog of fakes. Some of the fakes get a paragraph describing their manufacture or patina.

The coins are divided into three sections. The first section contains all coins except the Mandev and Histiaia fakes. The second section is the Mandev studio coins. The third is the tetrobols.

The Histiaia coins are all shown life size and with an accompanying enlargement. Only 18 non-Histiaia coins are enlarged. The enlargements are on three separate pages far from the life sized image the description. I would have preferred to see the enlargements next to the life size photo and description. The same glossy paper is used throughout so there is no benefit to forcing the reader to flip around for enlargements.

Putting the Mandev coins into their own section makes sense because seeing them together helps the expert develop an eye for the Mandev style. It also makes it harder to find particular coins. I would have preferred to see the Mandev coins mixed in with the other fakes AND shown together, as enlargements, in a separate Mendev section.

Recommended and a bargain at $28 postpaid.

Counterfeit Studios and Their Coins by Ilya Prokopov

Counterfeit Studios and Their Coins by Ilya Prokopov and Ruman Manov
Published in 2005, in Bulgaria, text in English. $20 + $8 shipping from the publisher SP-P. Some coin dealers stock it.

CS&TS is highly recommended.

The book is 88 pages long and covers:

55 Greek coins (2 electrum, 2 gold, 40 silver, 4 more 'low quality', 7 more suspect silver and a suspect fourree)
2 Roman Republican
44 Roman (6 gold, 8 AE, 9 silver, 12 more silver, 5 more AE, 2 more silver, a gold, and a billon copy of a gold, one more suspect)
3 Roman Provincial

Besides the catalog of fakes there is a good short introduction to types of counterfeits, seven pages on diagnostics, and seven pages on the technical characteristics of seven forgery 'studios' producing fakes.

The chapter on diagnostics is appreciated. Prokopov discusses what to look for when examining surfaces with the microscope or magnifier and a bit about learning to detect fakes by feeling them. He even discusses smell!

The diagnostics chapter is a good start but doesn't make the reader an expert. This kind of material can't be learned from books. For example, Prokopov suggests touching genuine coins and learning the 'very specific odour' they give off. It is probably good that he doesn't try to name or describe the odor! Wine experts try to describe the smell of fine wines and even though they've had centuries to develop specialized vocabulary their wine descriptions aren't helpful to beginners. Numismatists shouldn't imitiate wine writers or encourage readers to become overconfident.

The chapter on forgery studios discusses the striking technique and patinas of their fakes. Expect technical detail here as little is known (or can be revealed?) about the forgers themselves. The studios are merely identified by the name of their city or region.

The photographs are good, printed well on glossy paper, and there are blowups of some coins at the end.

What I found annoying about the book is the organization. The first section of coins discusses the good fakes. Next come the low-quality fakes from Ruman Manov's collection. The final section is suspected fakes.

Within each section the organization is good--Greek geographically then Roman chronologically. The problem is the three main categories. That ordering works well when reading. When using the book as a reference against specific fakes it is difficult to remember if a particular fake type was one of the low-quality fakes of Manov, or is only strongly suspected of being fake, or is in another similar volume by Prokopov! I crave an index to the series.

This book is a great bargain at $28 if it warns you away from a single fake. Highly recommended.

ANS booksale: journals

The ANS Duplicate Book Sale page now lists offered journals. There are only four titles, but long runs of them: Spink's Numismatic Circular, Seaby's Coin and Medal Bulletin, Coin Hoards, and Numismatist. The dates of the walk in sales, starting next Saturday, are also up.

Why let your ideas die with you?

Some web site is encouraging people to donate their copyrights to society at death.

The bizarre ancient coin videos of Gregory Zorzos

Strange ancient coins by Gregory Zorzos

Coins with Sphinx by Gregory Zorzos

Coins of Alexander the Great Vol 4 by Gregory Zorzos

Coins of the Seleucid Kings by Gregory Zorzos

The ancient Macedonian coins, the Greek letters and the lies

etc, etc, etc...

How people count cash

A video by Samimy Various Films on MetaCafe show styles of currency counting around the world.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1098393/how_people_count_cash/

I count money in the US/Canada/UK style. I was unaware that it was a cultural thing; I assumed everyone counted money like me.

Online Mionnet

Archivum on FORVM has collected links to a complete readable Mionnet set.

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=34502.msg276362#msg276362.

Mionnet describes all the ancient Greek and Provincial coins he knows, and gives them values (in francs, in the early 19th century). The series is insanely detailed, 7000 or 9000 pages, and includes a lot of coins and inscriptions you won't see online elsewhere.

ANS sale of duplicate catalogs

The ANS sale continues. Updated PDFs have been posted with sold-out titles removed. The NFA catalogs I was hoping for were already gone although I bid Saturday, before the announcement hit the e-Sylum.

I did catch a complete or near-complete set of Bankhaus H. Aufhauser/Hauck & Aufhauser catalogs.

If, like me, you are interested in the catalogs for their research value I'd like to remind you of Warren Esty's ancient coin auction catalog site. This site tells how many ancient coins are in each catalog, how good the coins are, and breaks the counts down into Greek, Roman, Byzantine, etc.

I also recommend collectors of Greek coins visit Kolbe 105 catalog for the essays recommending the catalogs of various firms. Most of the firms recommended by Dr. Koppersmith have already sold in the ANS sale.

Advertising-supported eBooks

TeleRead has an interesting post about Wowio royalties.

Wowio is a company that gives away e-Books of recent titles. They can do this because they add advertising. (I haven't actually downloaded any of their titles myself.) No numismatic titles, but I did see a free children's book on ancient Greek science and technology. Amazon sells the same book for about $12 plus shipping.

$2 auction catalogs

The American Numismatic Society is selling duplicates in preparation for the move. The catalogs for the first part of this sale are now online.

The ANS is charging $2 per title! That is a pretty good price for some of these titles, like The Garrett Collection, which regularly sell on eBay for much more.

The catalog of US dealer catalogs is 28 pages. The non-US dealer catalog is 97 pages. These catalogs were put together in haste, and some US dealers like Freeman & Sear appear in the non-US list. So check both.

Some of the catalogs go back to the '50s but must seem to be from the '80s and '90s.

I was surprised to see Numismatic Fine Arts catalog in the sale. Retiring librarian Campbell kept the library's good copies in the Rare Book Room. He would get particular auctions if asked... but there was no browsing. For that reason, I've never seen a real NFA catalog! It used to bug me that Mionnet's own copy of Mionnet (1806-1837), with his hand-annotations, was in the open stacks — but recent NFA catalogs were in the rare book room.

I sent in an order for the NFA catalogs (but not the fixed price lists...)

Notes on Kolbe 105

The downloadable catalog is a “SECURED” PDF! Printing the catalog is allowed, but selecting text, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it into another document is disabled. For example, pasting information about particular lots into a blog is not allowed.

(DRM is irritating. For historical sciences like numismatics it's especially painful because so much depends upon what has been said before.)

Lot 29 was a surprise to me. It's a CD-ROM of the Library catalogue of British and Royal Numismatic Societies. I wasn't aware of this title, although The ANS library has a copy (in the multi-media section — also new to me). The ANS entry implies the disks were a suppliment to the 2003 Numismatic Chronical.

Catalog 105 follows the usual Kolbe format of being first divided into consigners, then arranged alphabetically by author within each consignment. I don't understand the arrangement; I'd prefer to see it first arranged by subject. So ancient coin books can be found in lots 1-447, and also 582-623. Perhaps this is a good arrangement for future scholars tracing back ownership of books?

Kolbe auction 105

George F. Kolbe's Auction 105 catalog is now up.

715 lots, with emphasis on works on ancient Greek coins. Also included is an essay on collecting books on Archaic and Classical Greek coins by Daniel L. Koppersmith.

Dear JSTOR

The Stingy Scholar asks Dear JSTOR: Why won't you let me in?.

Elsen 243

Jean Elsen list 243 is online and includes 315 ancients and over 500 medieval coins. Also offered are nearly 200 numismatic books which were not included in the printed catalog.

Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses

Cory Doctorow proposes in today's Guardian Unlimited that “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses”.

e-Book on counterfeits by Prokopov

Ilya Prokopov's new book, Coin Forgeries and Replicas 2007, is only available as an e-Book.

This book is as good, or better, than previous books in the series. The other books cost $20 plus $8 in postage. The e-Book is only $9. The publisher is SP-P & Provias.

After purchasing the book (with Paypal), an email arrives with a one-time URL. The buyer is expected to use the browser to save the URL rather than opening it. This produces a 48MB .PDF file. There is no troublesome DRM on this file. You should have no problem printing the book or copying it to a CD-ROM. Obviously, please don't make copies for your friends — $9 is a pretty good price for Dr. Prokopov's hard work. This is an eighty page book!

The book covers

• 72 Greek coins (2 are gold, 1 AE, the rest silver)
  
• 8 Roman Republican
  
• 66 Roman (silver, AE, and gold)
  

In most, but not all cases, the coins are high-resolution and easy to see. There are a few nice blow-ups. Unfortunately, a few coins only have tiny, low-resolution images. It is explained that these were made “under urgent conditions”. Dr. Prokopov is documenting a criminal enterprise and sometimes it is difficult to get the criminals to cooperate!

For many of the coins Prokopov identifies the forgery “studio”. If he knows he describes the manufacture and patinating process used by the forger. There is a lot of interesting stuff here, much of which was new to me. I found a group of Roman Republican fakes the most interesting. The forger made porous casts then partially silver plated them. From a distance, it looks a lot like genuine “crystalization”.

Prokopov's English is easily readible. There are a few minor spelling errors and unexpected word choices. These minor defects are not important. This is an important work and highly recommended.

Charles Davis to auction ANS book duplicates

Charles Davis will be auctioning duplicates from the American Numismatic Society Febuary 2nd. 682 lots, including 342 lots of works on ancient coins. A PDF of the printed catalog is online.

The printed catalogs arrived a few weeks ago. Charles Davis doesn't send email notices or post to mailing lists and if I hadn't gotten a printed catalog I wouldn't have noticed the sale.

Dritto, a symbol for 'Obverse'

We've previously discussed numismatic symbols meaning 'reverse'.



Francesco Gnecchi's Monete romane: Manuale elementare comp (1896), in Italian, provides on pages 9-11 lists of Italian, French, English, and German numismatic abbreviations and symbols with corresponding meanings in Italian.

He includes the symbol that resembles the Prescription sign, ℞, which he considers Italian and English. His symbol has a wild look: the crossbar is curved and nearly as big as the R.

Gnecchi also includes a symbol I haven't seen before, resembling a D with a large tilde through it, which he defines as 'Dritto'.

I have never encountered this Dritto symbol. However, I don't read Italian books on numismatics. If you have seen this symbol elsewhere, please post a comment.

The Zero Rupee Note

From the mutiny.in blog, The Zero Rupee Note.

DRM is bad

DRM, or Digital Rights Management, is technologies that allow publishers to control how video and e-books are used. For example, publishers can assign passwords, or prevent printing, or prevent copying paragraphs to the clipboard for pasting into book reports.

DRM is bad for purchasers because it is complex and error-prone. Publishers say it is a good deal from consumers, claiming the restriction prevents pirates from bootlegging copies, thus allowing the publishers to sell for lower prices. As e-books and song downloads cost nearly as much as buying hardcovers and CDs, this claim seems dubious.

With DRM, you effectively have the material but the ability to read it is stored online. One of the biggest dangers of DRM is that problems with the publisher will lock you out of media you've paid for! This happened recently when Major League Baseball cut off access for fans who had bought videos of baseball games.

Almost no one likes DRM. So it was surprising to see Kevin Barry and Zachary 'Beast' Beasley promoting it in their January 2008 Celator column, The Internet Connection. They write “We firmly believe that authors and publishers should be paid for their efforts, and DRM is particularly important for niche markets such as ancient coin reference books.”

There is a bit of irony here. The Celator doesn't pay. I doubt Barry and Beasley got paid to write that authors should be paid. Barry and Beasley write about the Internet, a medium where almost no one gets paid.

Most numismatic books lose money. Folks mostly write because they love to share their knowledge. It would be great if writers got paid more than, say, coin dealers. This doesn't happen. Making it harder to buy an e-book hurts writers.

The ANS library is worth a visit. They have 18th century numismatic books in open stacks. I have looked at these books. They still work. I don't get an error opening up an Eckhel or Mionnet tome because the publisher is out-of-business and my password didn't handle Y2k, or Y1800, or Latin becomming a dead language. If numismatic books get DRM-ed, then book buyers will get screwed just like baseball fans.

I'm not saying this because I'm a pirate. I don't copy books that are in-print, and I try hard to avoid copying out-of-print books. I prefer books to coins, and returned from the NY International show without any new coins but with three new books. I'm saying this as a friend. Avoid DRM.

I did purchase a DRM-ed numismatic book once, Barclay Head's BMC Ionia. Even though I paid, and had a password, my computer wasn't compatible. I downloaded a free program to bypass the DRM. I had to waste a lot of time. The 'publisher' didn't send a cent to Barclay Head. Not because he's been dead for 90 years, but because the book is in the public domain.

Barry and Beasley don't mention numismatic e-books, except to say Spink has no plans to publish any. A title that looks interesting is from Krause — 2008 Standard Catalog of World Coins 3 DVD Set. This is the Krause books 1801-1900, 1901-2000 and 2001-Present. I saw the box at the Krause booth at the NY International show last week but haven't used the product or seen it demonstrated. George Cuhaj confirmed the illustrations are black and white.

Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger 254-255

The catalog for the Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger auction arrived today. It's also online. 700+ ancient coins, plus many antiquities, medieval, and modern coins.

Detecting counterfeits

The Kansas City Star has an article about counterfeit $100 bills. It features a great picture of four 'craftworkers' examining an enlargement of the bill.

MA-Shops

I saw a demonstration of MA-Shops at NYINC today. It is a European competitor to VCoins. Supposedly there are 120,000 items for sale on it already. I see 1350 ancient Greek coins, 3082 Romans, and 213 Byzantine. 922 Medieval. A lot of modern coins, especially German. About 500 numismatic books.

I like MA-Shops' ability to view by category. I think that's better than VCoins, which has per-store categories but no overall. The downside of MA-Shops is the search functions. It doesn't support wildcard searching (*). It doesn't support automatic synonym searching. Those features what makes VCoins great, and they are needed even more on MA-Shops because a lot of the descriptive text on the site isn't in English. This means a lot of searching for the same term in various languages.

Wetterstrom bans Wikipedia

Last July's issue of The Celator contains an editorial from Kerry Wetterstrom. Kerry has decided he can no longer accept articles that reference Wikipedia.

Kerry won't accept articles citing Wikipedia because 1) “trolls” are creating deliberate falsehoods in it, 2) Universities are banning the site and 3) An excellent Celator submission had errors in rulers dates and the source was Wikipedia.

I was working on a long rant against Kerry's policy, but instead of posting it I went to Wikipedia and updated the entry for Polyxenios and pointed out a problem with a Bopearachchi citation on the discussion page for Menander I.

I wish Kerry's editorial told us the names of the rulers with incorrect dates. I am currently interested in Polyxenios, but it probably wasn't him! Kerry's advice for getting information that is good enough for The Celator is to “... visit your local library, as they usually have the basic historical references.”

The only (modern) book I have that mentions Polyxenios is Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum: American Numismatic Society, part 9, Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins (1998) which places him circa 100 BC, presumably based merely on his coin sharing monograms with slighly less dubious Baktrian dynasts. Bopearachchi doesn't mention that R.C. Senior disagrees with him. I don't have Senior's books and don't know if he says why he disagrees with Bopearachchi.

Errors in regnal dates don't bother me. A good article on Polyxenious' coinage would still be good if the author followed Mr. Bopearachchi, Mr. Senior, or reported the disagreement when dating the coins. Kerry should re-consider. However, authors should also consider that citing Wikipedia makes them look kinda dumb. It is better to obtain the books and articles cited in the ===References=== section of the Wikipedia article and see what the experts actually said!

Egypt retroactively copyrights antiquities

The BBC is reporting that Egypt is expected to pass a law granting copyright status to full-scale replicas of any object in any museum in Egypt. The copyright holder will apparently be Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Although Zahi Hawass told the BBC that the new law will apply to all countries, this seems unlikely. International copyright law is based on the Berne Convention. Article 18 says that the Convention only applies to works which were not in public domain when the treaty came into force. So new laws retroactively copyrighting the pyramid will not work. But suppose that Iraq, which is currently not a signer of Berne, got its act together and joined the WTO. It would have to respect the laws in place at signing, including this odd new Egyptian law.

I'm not a lawyer, and perhaps some other law or treaty would make this enforceable in the US.

I think this is a silly law, but Egypt has not asked my opinion. I suspect it would apply to replicas of any coins in any museum in Egypt. (It seems like it would be easy to get around it, by making 99% or 101% scale copies.)

Google Book Search (by subject)

Google Book Search has a new (or new to me) 'subject' advanced search option.

There are 72 full-text books for subject 'coins', 123 for subject 'coins, greek', 132 for subject 'coins, roman' and 32 for for 'coins, ancient'.

'coins, american' yields only 1 full-view title, Catalogue of John W. Haseltine's Type Table of U.S. Dollars, Half Dollars & Quarter Dollars, also Many Other Rare and Fine Coins ..., a Bangs & Company auction from November 28-30, 1881

The quotes are important if you enter the comma. A search for coins, american yields 0 hits. coins american and "coins, american" both yield titles.

Although there is only one full-view American title, there are 4 with limited previews and 600+ searchable 'snippet view' titles.

Alex Malloy numismatic library auction

Malter Galleries will be auctioning the Alex G. Malloy library on January 12-13th.

The auction is not part of the New York International but is being held across the street during the coin show. It will also be possible to bid live on eBay.

Part 2 is 1568 lots of numismatic literature, mostly on ancients (there are only three lots on US coins). There is also a Part 1, 739 lots of books on antiquities, ancient art, and archeology.

There is a full page add in December's The Celator.

There might be some bargains. The books will be sold without reserves or minimums. Interestingly, the catalog doesn't describe the condition of the books. There will be new preview at NYINC. Instead, “Preview books will be only at a New Jersey home, about 1 hour outside of NYC. Preview will begin 2 weeks prior to the auction”

NYINC

The NYINC web site is up. There will be six auctions.

In case you haven't noticed, sixbid.com has a new look. Links to the NYINC Triton XI and Gemini IV auctions are there. The Gemini catalog includes 72 brockages from the Marc Melcher Brockage Collection.

The catalog for the Baldwin/Markov/M&M “New York Sale” is also up.

Pravda uses photo from Ancient Coins Canada

When I was growing up we were terrified of the Soviet Union's hydrogen bombs. The official Soviet newspaper was Pravda. We were worried when American newspapers reported angry talk from Russian leaders in Pravda.

Pravda now has a web site, and on the web site is a report of the arrest of a 70-year-old barber. He was arrested in Greece for possession of ancient coins without a license (a license is needed to collect in Greece).

http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/03-12-2007/102135-Greece_coins-0

The barber had 2,300 Hellenistic and Roman bronze coins. Pravda, the mighty former mouthpiece of the Kremlin, wanted to illustrate the Associated Press story. Pravda's editors didn't have a photo of the barber's collection or even a good stock photo of Roman bronzes from the Hermitage collection. They illustrated, with credit, an uncleaned lot offered by VCoins dealer Ancient Coins Canada.

The lot can be seen at http://www.ancientcoins.ca/uncleaned.html. Lot #unclgreek — uncleaned Greek coins for $6.50 each. Your chance to own a coin published in Pravda!

Islamic coins recovered in Iraq

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/world/middleeast/12iraq.html

The New York Times, in a story on the Iraqi museum, reports tomorrow that “... directors have managed to recover 4,000 missing pieces, among them gems, Islamic coins and carved stones.”

It has been firmly established that there were no coins in the 15,000 stolen items. So how were coins recovered?

...recovery picked up as word spread that rewards were offered for items returned.

I'm glad that the museum is acquiring more coins for its collection. I am irritated that the Times continues to imply that coins were looted from the museum.

80,000 Reagan artefacts missing from museum

(This is a month old, and has nothing to do with coins.)

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/news/story/0,,2208145,00.html

The Guardian is reporting that 80,000 pieces in the collection of 100,000 items at the Reagan library are missing.

After antiquities thefts at Turkish museums there was chatter in the press that Turks were especially bad at museum security. Turns out things are not much better in California.

(via Art Law News)

FBI seizes two tons of Ron Paul dollars

The RabidQuill reports:

I sincerely regret to inform you that about 8:00 this morning a dozen FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Liberty Dollar office in Evansville.

For approximately six hours they took all the gold, all the silver, all the platinum and almost two tons of Ron Paul Dollars that where (sic) just delivered last Friday. They also took all the files, all the computers and froze our bank accounts.

Although the website offering the Ron Paul dollar is up, ordering does not work. There are a few left on eBay.

ANSMagazine.com

The ANS has placed the entire contents of their magazine online.

As an ANS volunteer, I did the design and HTML for the site. The ANS supplies me with QuarkXPress files, and I convert them to HTML manually.

snible.org still down

Snible.org comes from LinuxWebHost.com, which depends on servers from Alabanza.com. Alabaza was acquired two months ago by NaviSite. NaviSite apparently laid off many of the folks who run the Baltimore data center where snible.org lived and were moving things to Andover Massachusettes because the lease on the Baltimore center was over.

Here is an article on what is happening: http://www.ipdemocracy.com/archives/2007/11/05/
Latest info from Alabanza at http://www.navisite.com/sublevel.aspx?id=2017

According to a post on webhostingtalk.com, 175,000 web site are down because NaviSite fouled this move.

They tried to move a few weeks ago, sites were down for maybe an hour, and they rolled back the move. They got a lot of flack for failing the move, so this time when they had problems they just decided to work through it.

Apparently direct customers of Andover are getting a couple of uniformative messages a day about the problem. I've heard nothing from LinuxWebHost.com. I called them and they now just tell me to watch for updates on Alabanza.com

Supposedly 30 techs are working on this problem, although another source says over 100.

snible.org down

My personal web site, and Historia Numorum host snible.org is down. This also means I'm not getting my email.

The problem is at my provider, linuxwebhost.com. This weekend they tried to move from Baltimore to Andover.

Sorry for the disruption. The Wiki version at NumisWiki is up. If you haven't visited NumisWiki before, there is some good stuff there, including articles on fakes by Ilya Prokopov. The most recent prevents some Apollonia Pontika fakes with rough surfaces.

Frank Robinson auction

I haven't been writing much lately. Sorry, loyal readers.

Frank Robinson Mail Bid Sale #70 up. 396 lots, closing November 6th. These auctions are often good for bargain hunting.

Gorny & Mosch auctions 159-162

Gorny & Mosch auctions 159-162 are online. 2500+ lots of ancients. Also Medieval, modern and Russion coins. Auctions to take place the second week of October.

fine art insect casings

(This is also unrelated to ancient coins. I thought pictures were worth sharing anyway.)

French artist Hubert Duprat has tricked an insect called the caddis fly into assembling something very much like jewelry. Photos can be seen in an article on Duprat in Cabinet magazine.

The artist puts the insects in aquariums containing gold and jewels instead of the usual nesting materials.

United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster

(this has nothing to do with ancient coins)

A link on reddit.com lead me to Henry Mark Holzer's essay “How Americans Lost Their Right To Own Gold And Became Criminals in the Process”. It briefly describes court cases establishing FDR's seizure of gold.

I mention this because I really liked the case name United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster. 208 F. Supp. 99 (D. Nev. 1962). Holzer describes the rooster as a “206 troy ounce, eighteen karat gold rooster—the symbol of a Nevada casino's 'Golden Rooster Room'”. That name really tickled me... US versus a gold rooster. A gold rooster!

Fall catalogs starting to appear

Paul-Francis Jacquier's 2007 list is up. 700+ coins, 300+ books. There is a lot of good stuff here. Jacquier's site isn't part of sixbid.com, so it is easy to miss. I would not be aware of him at all if I hadn't spotted one of his numismatic literature catalogs on a table at the NY International several years ago.

The Auktionen Meister & Sonntag catalog, auction 5, is up on Sixbid.com. September 19-20th. Ancient coins, also 100+ lots of literature.

CNG 76

CNG 76 is online.

It includes a half Athenian Dekadrachm.

A few years ago CNG started describing the Etrurian 'gorgon' coins as depicting Metus, the personification of Fear. I haven't noticed any other catalogers doing this. I wonder what lead to the change?

In Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon, Stephen Wilk theorizes some 'gorgons' might depict Fear and Dread, but he knows of no examples.

... there is no longer anything to buy in New York for 10 cents

San Francisco Chronicle story by Steve Rubenstein on the logistics of transporting a rare coin.

SNG Newcastle remaindered?

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Volume XIII: The Collection of the Society of Antiqaries, Newcastle Upon Tyne, $30.

48 B&W plates.

Color images of the coins can be found in the British SNG Database.

hobbyblog

Three weeks ago hobbyblog shut down.

It was the first ancient coin blog with regular content, and an old-timer when I started blogging.

hobbyblog posted one coin per day. The coins were often rare provincials. I visited hobbyblog a few times a week. It was a good blog.

I recently changed blogger templates and my blogroll went away. But hobbyblog was first on that list. The coins are all still there in the archives, there just aren't new posts.

Caron and Tilde

I know my readers are all hungry for information on the typographic symbol for the reverse of a coin. No luck yet.

Unrelated to coins, but today I was reading Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names. It's a list of the mistakes the worlds smartest experts on alphabets made when writing down the names of the characters.

A note under 'Caron' (inverted hat on some Czech letters) says "The term 'caron' is suspected by some to be an invention of some early standards body, but it has also been claimed by others to have been in use at Linotype before the days of digital typography. Its true origin may be lost in the mists of time." By mists of time, they mean the 1980s! Wikipedia has details.

It reminded me of a similar story, the history of the tilde. The famous squiggle character, ~, which existed for hundreds of years in Spanish to indicate a different n and is on every keyboard, was only born in 1963! It is not much older than I.

Jean Elsen list 241

The catalog for Jean Elsen list 241 arrived in the mail yesterday.

400+ ancient coins, plus many medieval and modern, and numismatic books.

Podcast of Thom Bray interviewing Wayne Sayles

Thom Bray's Pieces of Time has a new 'podcast'. This one features Thom Bray interviewing Wayne Sayles.

The new podcast is 14 minutes long. I listened to it on my computer, but it can be downloaded to an iPod or MP3 player.

Short article on forgery detection by Ilya Prokopov

FORVM has a short article by Ilya Prokopov on detecting fakes struck with modern dies. It is well worth reading.

A brief discussion on FORVM's boards shows what might be a clever fake of a Greek coin detected using the technique.

Coin shortage in Assam

The BBC reported a few weeks ago that millions of Indian coins are being smuggled into neighbouring Bangladesh and turned into razor blades. A new token currency has arisen: “To deal with the coin shortage, some tea gardens in the north-eastern state of Assam have resorted to issuing cardboard coin-slips to their workers. The denomination is marked on these slips and they are used for buying and selling within the gardens.”

(via Marginal Revolution)

I couldn't find any photos of the cardboard 'coin-slips'. They are the same size as the coins they replace.

The USA has taken steps to prevent this from happening here: It's illegal to melt pennies or nickels. It is also illegal for travelers to carry more than 100 nickels out of the country.

Only two days left for bringing Cypriot coins into USA

David Welsh, on UNIDROIT-L, reports that import restrictions are being imposed on Cypriot coins.

The full text is available in The Federal Register v. 72 no. 134.

As of Monday you'll need a valid Cypriot export permit to bring ancient Cypriot coins into the USA. If you were planning on importing anything, spare yourself some trouble and do it this weekend.

Three more BMC Greek titles from Google Book Search

Vol. 16 Ionia, by Head, 1892.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

Vol. 17 Troas, Aeolis and Lesbos, by Wroth, 1894.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

Vol. 19 Lycia, Pamphylia and Pisidia, by Hill, 1897.

• Preface,
  Contents,
  Coins,
  Indexes,
  Plates.
  

All three volumes can be downloaded as PDF files.

Google now offers a 'view plain text' option that lets you see, as well as cut-and-paste, the OCRed text. (Cutting and pasting seemed to work better if I switched views to 'standard HTML mode', another new feature.) For these particular volumes the OCR is quite poor, probably because of the tables and multi-lingual text.

More )(

The )( symbol is a new obsession of Wayne Homren, who reports in today's e-Sylum that he has contracted the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, The Type Museum here in London, the International Printing Museum near Los Angeles, the Museum of Printing in North Andover, MA; the JAARS Museum of the Alphabet in Waxhaw, NC; and the St. Brides Printing Library in London.

No useful replies yet.

In a June 3 comment here, Dr. Robert J. O’Hara pointed to an 18th century list of alchemical symbols, Medicinisch-Chymisch- und Alchemistisches Oraculum (1755), which includes both )( and ℞. Both symbols abbreviate words beginning with RE (Realgar and Recipe). If one needed to abbreviate “reverse” down to a single character to save space it makes sense to use a symbol which had already served that purpose. )( was such a symbol, but would numismatic readers in the 18th century have understood it?

The earliest numismatic use that I know of is from 1758, in a book published in Vienna, Prague, and Triest by Ioannis Thomae Trattner. However, I just haved looked. I don't have any 17th or 18th century books, and Google has scanned only a few. I would be curious to find earlier citations of the symbol. It would be interesting if the symbol started with publishers known for printing alchemical works. I have before never considered a connection between numismatics and alchemy.

It is interesting that the symbol died out. It was used by Eckhel, who is the father of numismatics as a science. It seems logical that authors would want to make the works look more like Eckhel's, so why did the symbol die out? Possibly type setters didn't have the symbol, but perhaps even in the 19th century no one knew the name of the symbol or its exact meaning?