“This was like a moonshot for us”

Kyle VanHemert describes the US Mint's baseball commemorative for Wired Online.

“This was like a moonshot for us,” says Stephen C. Antonucci, manager of digital development for the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia. “It stretched the bounds of everything we knew about coin development.”

Yes, there will be a half dollar. It will be clad.

Cisco AnyConnect was overwhelming my Mac

Recently my Mac's battery life fell to about an hour. I repaired the problem, but didn't see it reported on the web, so I will post it here so Google can find it.

The Activity Monitor app showed acwebsecagent and ReportCrash using about 15% of the CPU. The Console app showed the messages

3/8/14 10:36:22.543 AM acwebsecagent[1049]: Config : The service only loads an obfuscated configuration file
3/8/14 10:36:22.543 AM acwebsecagent[1049]: ERROR : Failed to load Configuration file
3/8/14 10:36:23.516 AM acvpnagent[75]: 'acwebsecagent' service process , pid 1049, terminated
3/8/14 10:36:25.579 AM ReportCrash[1024]: Saved crash report for acwebsecagent[1052] version ??? to /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/acwebsecagent_2014-03-08-103625_....crash

The problem seemed to come from Cisco AnyConnect.

The fix was

sudo /opt/cisco/anyconnect/bin/websecurity_uninstall.sh

I don't know why it worked!

iSIS aRMour

The Royal Mint (UK) has designed a new coin process said to make make forgery impossible.

2 minute video.

The technology, called iSIS, is apparently a special material that can be added to the aRMour technology that electroplates a 25 micron coating on coin blanks. No details on what the material is. A PDF nomination to the International Association of Currency Affairs I found online explained that there will be low speed 'simple iSIS' detectors at point-of-sale (in shops) as well as 'advanced iSIS' high speed detectors in banks.

The Royal Mint's iSIS page.

Seminar in Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics this weekend

Readers might be interested in the Sixth Annual Seminar in Central Asian and Middle Eastern Numismatics at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY this weekend. Hempstead is on Long Island, about 25 miles East of Manhattan. There is a train to Hempstead, but it takes a long time, and I have never taken it. The drive isn't bad.

I went last year and it was great. Very advanced. If you have a chance, go.

Indian government officials seize hoard of 104 'pottu kasu'

Writing for The Times of India, Bosco Dominique tells us that Indian government officials seized a hoard of gold (?) 'pottu kasu' weighing roughly five sovereigns.

I am uncertain what pottu kasu is. Google translates it as 'spud benefits'. A Reddit commentator transliterates it as pattu kasu or padi kasulu and translates it as 'ten cents'. A sovereign weights 8g and these coins were 1/20 that so perhaps the coins are gold fanams.

The coins were discovered by accident by workers digging a septic tank. The report focuses not on the coins, but on how the finders attempted to divide and keep the coins.

Periyannan took the metal box and broke it in the presence of the farmer. To their surprise, they found small gold-like coins. They believed that someone might have buried the metal box with coins after performing rituals to ward off evil spirits. The farmer transferred the coins to a plastic container and kept it in his house. ...

The worker along with Kabilan and another person reached Murugan's house and demanded their share. Murugan came forward to hand over the entire treasure to them but the worker and others took only 43 coins ...

Meanwhile, Ramasamy's wife Anjalai reached Periyannan's house and created a ruckus when she learned that he had got a share of the coins while her husband had not. The news soon spread in the village and the villagers informed the police.

$409,200,000 of Bitcoins stolen, Mt. Gox shuts down, one million people lose account balances

Cameron Keng writes for Forbes that the Mt. Gox web site has been hacked and shut down.

744,000 BitCoins, until recently worth over $400 million USD, were hacked. As far as I can tell there is no way to get the coins back. One million folks kept accounts, called 'wallets', on the site.

Bitcoins are trading now for US $490 (as of 9:15am), down from over $600 yesterday.

Who stole it? Well, there is a Bitcoin address that recently had BTC782,000 move through it. That address is now empty, but scroll down and see large BTC payments going all over.

150 coins siezed at Romanian coin show

Does anyone speak Romanian? I found an article (no byline?) suggesting

Police confiscated [at] a numismatic and philatelic market in Brasov 154 old coins, some dating from the second and first centuries BC, and others [from] the medieval period that would come from archaeological sites which were sold illegally at fair prices between 5 and 20 lei.

(Google translation to English)

5 lei is $1.50, I believe, and 20 lei is $6.

Dealing with the small change shortage in modern Palestine

Writing for y-net-news.com, Elior Levy reports on improvised replacements for the vanished half-shekel coins in occupied Gaza. Bus and taxi drivers either give change in candy, or round-up when traveling in one direction and round-down when traveling in the other. Although small change is still being minted,

Gazans have been running low on Israeli coin currency for a while, partly due to an Israeli-imposed ban on copper imports. The creative solution engineered by Gazans was to melt down change to create copper wire.

Mithradates’ Amazon coin type

(CNG, auction 61, 2002, lot 245)

Pictured above is a very scarce bronze coin struck by Mithradates the Great. It is usually described as depicting an Amazon wearing a wolf's scalp. We know that Mithradates' die cutters liked to engrave the face of Mithradates into his coins. There are Alexander-style tetradrachms depicting Herakles with the features of Mithradates. There are also bronzes which seem to show Perseus with the features of Mithradates.

Is it possible that the "Amazon" coins depict not a generic Amazon, but the one most important to Mithradates, his wife Hypsicratea? It would be wonderful to have a coin with the features of this legendary Amazon queen.

Many of Mithradates’ types seem to illustrate the myth of Perseus. There are tetradrachms with Pegasos reverse, large bronzes of Athena head/Perseus, large Perseus/Pegasos bronzes, this aegis/Nike bronze, and a small bronze Perseus/harpa. Barclay Head explained in 1911 the significance of the types: “On these coins the supposed Persian descent of Mithradates is emphasized by the types relating to Perseus.” Mithradates’ other bronze types include Zeus (who fathered Perseus) and Dionysos (who fought Perseus).

Warwick Wroth speculated in 1889 that the female head in ‘wolf’s skin’ type issued by Mithradates represents Andromeda. Wroth suggested that the ‘wolf’s skin’, which Mionnet called goat’s skin and James Millingen called griffin’s skin, is the skin of the ketos slain by Perseus. Mithradates’ other types are identified as “Ares” (?), “Head in leather cap”, and “Artemis”. These mythological figures are all identified by style; there is no certainty that Ares and Artemis are the correct identification. Those coins could depict other characters from Perseus’ cycle and we would not know.

Unusual Amisos coin

This coin, with the inscription AMISOS in Greek, recently sold on eBay Germany for about 100 euros.

I don't think I've seen this type before. I didn't bid on it, as it isn't in my collecting area, but my mind keeps drifting back to it. The reverse seems to depict a bird, but it is not the usual eagle pose or the rare owl used by Mithradates VI.

The same seller also offered some of the typical Mithridates types of Amisos, but also the seldom seen Amazon/Nike and the almost never seen Artemis?/Owl types.

Any thoughts on who is pictured on the mystery coin? 24mm, 6.5g.

739 fake coins found in Cairo

Reporting for Ahram Oline, Nevine El-Aref writes “The 739 supposedly Mameluke-era coins discovered in a Cairo apartment have been deemed unauthentic by an archeological committee from the Museum of Islamic Art.”

It is uncertain if the photo in Ahram Online depicts the coins themselves or is a stock photo. Perhaps a stock photo, because the Museum Director General says the coins depict Italian and European dukes of the Mamluk era (1250-1517 AD).

“A Libyan citizen accidentally found the coins hidden in a wall while carrying out routine maintenance on his Nasr City apartment.... [Mostafa] Khaled from the MIA asserted that the coins would be melt[ed] down so that they can't be used as fakes in the antiquities trading market.”

Bitcoins

Alfredo De La Fé is reporting that well-known Chicago coin dealer Harlan Berk is accepting Bitcoins as payment for coin auctions. According to the Berk website:

For Bitcoin Payments: Please make your order from our web site using the wire as payment option. After orders are received we will send out a request for Bitcoins through Coinbase.

I have decided I need some BTC and have created a wallet on Coinbase. Please click this button to donate 1/1000 of a BitCoin to me. Donate Bitcoins

(Currently 0.001 BTC is worth about 90 cents).

Image enhancement papers

Mark Mudge, Jean-Pierre Voutaz, Carla Schroer, and Marlin Lum: Reflection Transformation Imaging and Virtual Representations of Coins from the Hospice of the Grand St. Bernard (2005)

Eleni Kotoula and Maria Kyranoudi Study of Ancient Greek and Roman coins using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (2013)

Agora Auctions

I want to call everyone's attention to a new auction site, Agora Auctions. They are already up to sale #4. I purchased a coin from sale #3 and it looks exactly like the picture. I have met the owners and they are good guys. The current auction closes on Tuesday.

Auction #4 has the usual good-quality Greek and Roman stuff but there is also some of the lesser-known stuff worth looking at. They have Parthian (including Bronze), Sasanian, and Kushan coins. I was surprised to see a Baktrian fourree. There is a nice run of medieval Islamic stuff.

For folks interested in replicas there are some Peter Rosa replicas of Greek coins in the British Museum including beautiful coins of Syracuse such as this tetradrachm, from Wayne Sayles' collection and illustrated in Classical Deception.

Don't skip the Group Lots! The auction isn't just dealer lots. The Roman Provincial brockage lot seems nice.

Cleaning

Museums clean ancient coins before putting them on display. Dealers and collectors often clean coins and many have their own favorite 'recipes' for cleaning.

A much bigger problem is the cleaning of paper money. The researchers Nabil Lawandy and Andrei Smuk claim that 150,000 tons worth of paper money, unfit for recirculation, are removed from circulation every year at a cost of $10,000,000,000. The researchers have developed a method using supercritical CO₂ at 60°C and 5000 psi said to effectively clean both paper and polymer banknotes.

The researcher's paper is entitled Supercritical Fluid Cleaning of Banknotes.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

I don't collect paper money. Do collectors typically clean it? I have seen a YouTube video (from Suriname the former Dutch Guiana!) showing obsolete banknotes being cleaned in a bucket. Three minutes in the presenter admits he's never done it before!

Fake $100 bill signed 'Moe Money'

Martha Waggoner, writing for the Raleigh News Observer, reports that a 19 year old college student was arrested after passing a counterfeit $100 bill. “The signature on the bottom corner of the bill read "Moe Money" instead of the name of the secretary of the treasury. Underneath the signature, the bill read 'Proprietor of the Counterfeiting.'” Police seized a deskjet printer and ink cartridge.

Imitative 'wolf and twins'

Usually I don't collect Roman coins but something really attracted me to this tiny AE 8mm when I saw it at the New York International show.

The seller described it as a "barbarous imitation" of Helena / Wolf and Twins.  (The portrait could also be Fausta.) I don't think there ever was an official Roman coin with that combination.  There weren't any Roman coins quite this small.

I have never looked into late Roman imitations before. I would have expected there to be a catalog of them, either the inventory of a museum or an illustrated auction catalog with thousands of these. Does no one collect them? I would be curious to know if there are other coins like this.  I looked online and found some imitative wolf and twins on Warren Esty's site but nothing else.

I can see why it would be hard to understand the issuing tribes, given that the coins have no labels.  With unlabeled Greek coins the approach is by findspot.  For example, I have read that in Turkey the museums are entitled to everything found in their region. These museums never buy or sell.  Scholars guess the mints based on the number of samples in museum inventories. Is anyone doing statistics like that for Roman imitations?

Same Die Used for Silver and Electrum

Classical Numismatic Group recently auctioned a mysterious silver drachm as lot 114 in their recent auction at the New York International. The catalog notes the drachm is struck from the same die as Rosen 311, which is made of electrum, and Dewing 1008 (silver).

Perhaps one day sufficient specimens will exist to do a die study. I wonder if the electrum coins were struck earlier, later, or at the same time as the silver coins.

Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to inspect the coin myself. The auction photo is clear. The style of the reverse on the electrum specimen in Nancy Waggoner's catalog of the Rosen collection shows a square with a rough pattern. That reverse looks nothing like the four-part reverse on the silver specimens.

It would be unfortunate if the Rosen coin is false, as I believe an electrum gorgon/incuse to be.

I had a great time last week at the New York International. I was glad to see familiar faces. Hope everyone is having a good 2014. Feel free to reply in the comments section on this coin or any other topic related to the show or the new year.

The earliest Greek coin depicting a gorgon?

Perhaps the earliest Greek coin type depicting a gorgon was a series of rare electrum staters. We don’t know when they were struck but the style of their reverse punches suggests they were probably created before Athens struck the silver Wappenmünzen series around 520 BC. Ingrid Krauskopf and Stefan-Christian Dahlinger date this coinage to 650-600 in their LIMC entry on gorgon iconography.

These early electrum gorgons are very rare. I have only been able to find mention of two staters and four or five of the 1/3 stater pieces. Liselotte Weidauer pointed out in 1975 that both the 1/3 staters (which depict a single gorgon) and the double gorgon staters come from the same obverse die. When striking the 1/3 staters, the blank was somehow held over one half of the die.

I wish I could inspect a cast of the stater. From the published photographs it is hard to understand the border design on the double gorgon. I also struggle to see how the the 1/3 staters could receive two punches of the reverse without slipping out of the much larger obverse die. I also can’t figure out what order the reverse punches were done on the stater. It looks like the long vertical punch was applied last, which is the opposite of what I had expected, but I just can’t tell from the pictures.

Weidauer and John Kroll believe the reverse punches resemble the “I am the badge of Phanes” electrum coins depicting a deer, and they suggest Ephesos as the most likely mint. The British Museum’s 1/3 stater was apparently found on Rhodes and George Hill suggested an origin in Southern Ionia. The double gorgoneion design is very unusual. I don’t know of any other Greek examples but a similar double depiction of the Egyptian god Bes can be seen on a Philistian drachm.

Electrum Coinage (continued)

In a presentation delivered at the ANS Electrum Coinage conference, François Velde pointed out that early electrum coins have very precise weights but their gold:silver ratio varies widely. Since the local gold was pure the minters were likely adding random amounts of silver. So why carefully control the weight? He described these coins as basically lottery tickets.

Velde's observations expose the problem. The following should be considered a speculation...

If the minters explicitly added varying amounts of silver could they have been trying to purposely make the coinage less useful than the hack gold ingots in use at the time? Could the irregular bullion value of early electrum have been a "feature" rather than a "bug"?

It is usually presented that the cementation process of separating gold and silver was an improvement over natural electrum. The story is that when that process became available, under King Croesus, he switched his coinage to the superior bi-metallic system. We aren't sure exactly when the ancients first learned to separate gold and silver, or the precise issue period of early electrum coins. I wonder if the ability to separate gold and silver counter-intuitively caused to the appearance of mixed (electrum) coinage, rather than set the stage for the end of early electrum.

David Graeber points out in his intriguing Debt: The First 5000 Years (2012) that systems of accounting based on debt long preceded coinage. He speculates that coinage was invented as a scheme to provision an army. In Graeber's view, rather than forcing citizens to provide food and materials for an army, a king merely demands a tax in coins he only issues to his army.

Electrum seems perfectly suited to a paranoid king attempting such a scheme. The equipment to separate gold and silver takes a lot of capital to build. Refineries are hard to conceal because of the smoke and smell. It would be easy to have a royal monopoly on parting gold. Mercenaries paid in electrum were less likely to desert if they knew their leader was the only person who could convert their electrum coins into more valuable hack gold.

Such a king could stamp the electrum he issued to his soldiers to ensure the populace equipped the right army. (His army.) I can imagine a lot of warlords running around ancient Lydia, each trying to obtain provisions from local farmers. Attempting a closed currency with identifiable stamped designs seems ideal.

Under such a system the precise weights serve the purpose of discouraging the unscrupulous from hacking or filing off a bit of the coin to keep for themselves. The weight standard can be seen as an anti-clipping technology rather than a promise of fixed bullion value.

Early electrum as a closed military coinage feels correct and compelling, but am I fooling myself? It would be nice to look for confirmation or something that could show the idea to be false. More precise dating could help … if we could show that gold refining was successful before early electrum coins were issued that would lend support. Or if I could find something that suggested early electrum economies were 'closed'.

Early Electrum Coinage Symposium

The American Numismatic Society recently hosted an Early Electrum Coinage Symposium. I had been unaware of the revolution that is happening in this important field. I had expected to learn about minor advances in the field, building upon what I thought I knew. Instead we learned that no one is certain if the electrum in the earliest Greek coins was found naturally or manufactured. We learned the minting techniques for early electrum are a mystery. We also developed a better understanding of our ignorance of the purpose and issue date of early coinage.

I came out of the conference much less informed than I entered. I loved it!

100 years ago early coinage was well understood. Two ancient authors, Herodotus and Xenophanes of Colophon, wrote that the ancient Lydians were the first to strike coins in gold and silver. Electrum is “a natural compound of gold and silver, collected at Sardes from the washings of the little mountain torrent Pactolus”. Everyone knew the earliest coins were struck from lumps of electrum first on a rough surface using hammers and rough punches. This process naturally lead to cutting images such as lions and deer upon anvils allowing a picture to appear on the front of the coin. These early coins were buried in the well-excavated foundation of the temple of Ephesus allowing them to be clearly dated. These primitive coins inspired a later and better system of gold and silver coinage.

The consensus view turns out to be mostly wrong. The Pactolus produces something more like gold than electrum. The anvil and punch technique couldn't have worked the way we thought. The gifts buried at the temple of Artemis weren't typical temple foundation objects. We aren't certain what happened in the refinery at Sardes. The electrum coins linked to certain wars probably need to be placed elsewhere.

The material presented at last months symposium in New York build upon the results of another conference presented last year in Jerusalem. A lot of it was multidisciplinary, drawing experts in mining and refining. I look forward to the proceedings of the Jerusalem White Gold conference.

Neutrino scientists and archeologists both want ancient Roman lead artifacts

Gerard LeBlond reports on the use of ancient lead for a new purpose.

A circulated brockage from Nepal

As a child error coins fascinated me. I had off-center cents and 5 cent pieces and a tattered copy of Alan Herbert's 1974 book The Official Guide to Mint Errors. The book had an entire chapter on brockages. I had never seen a brockage.

Brick-and-mortar coin shops didn't have brockages, at least not in Michigan. Even at a really big coin show it was rare to see one.

When I started collecting ancient coins I was surprised to discover ancient brockages are not exceedingly rare. Sixty-eight ancient examples are offered for sale right now on an ancient coin sale web site, as compared to a single modern brockage. (The site has twice as many total ancient coins as modern coins, so a better comparison would be 68:2.)

Would ancient users of coins even notice anything unusual when spending a brockage? It seems hard not to notice a brockage, yet we don't see any evidence that ancient brockages were put aside. They appear alongside regular coins in hoards.

I was surprised to find a modern, circulated brockage recently at a coin show. Even more surprising, it wasn't in a fancy holder. It was in a junk box among similar coins from the region. This coin, a Nepalese one paisa from 1947, somehow managed to circulate in Nepal during the 20th century. It then made its way to the United States and a dealer's try without anyone noticing anything unusual. This suggests that brockages do not "jump out" to the average user or even to a casual coin dealer. Perhaps it really takes a trained eye to "see" brockages?

I would be curious to know of other modern circulated brockages. Does anyone collect them?

Interesting thoughts on discouraging the ivory trade

Interesting thoughts on discouraging the ivory trade from an influential economist.

New eBay coin category

Virtual Currency is a new eBay category I haven't seen before. Not many listings yet.

Kshs

Design firm ARK has proposed a new symbol for the Kenyan Shilling.

I have been too busy with other things to post lately. Hope everyone is doing fine. In the comments section let me know what other numismatic blogs are worth reading.

Bitcoin mining machine

I haven't had much to write about for the past couple of months. I did read an article on Bitcoin mining. Highly recommended for techies. The article covers the mathematical bitcoins, not the physical Bitcoins that can be used to carry them.

3D Gadhaiya Paisa

As before, although the image looks OK without glasses you really want to use red/cyan 3D glasses to see this coin.

This enigmatic coinage was struck in India, 800-1300 AD. It's usually called “Gadhaiya Paisa”. I realize I know almost nothing about Indian coinage during this time. I have Michael Mitchiner's Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, covering coins up to the 4th century, but the rest of Indian coinage is a mystery to me until the British Raj period.

Is there a good book to get started with the mysterious pre-Islamic coins of India?

3d Menander

I have been taking 3D scans of a few favorite coins. The image is of a drachm of Menander. Red/cyan glasses should be worn to see the image properly.

Last month I posted a bronze coin scanned this way and got no comments. I would be curious to know if any of my readers have tried looking at these images with 3d glasses. I have a bunch more scans, but I'm not going to post them if no one has the glasses.

Forgery workshop uncovered in Italy (2004)

FORVM user Taras has posted a description of two 2004 seizures of counterfeit ancient coins and forgers dies in Italy. I was surprised the seizures included 870 counterfeit dies but only 371 fake coins. The post is worth reading for Taras' speculation on this workshop's methods.

Lost World of the Golden King

Frank Holt, Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (2012, 343 pages)

It's good! Holt retraces the development of Baktrian numismatics from the tetradrachm of Eukratides published in 1738 by Theophilus Siegfried Bayer to the present day. Holt's narrative is not a dry scholarly recap; he includes many stories including new research about the arrival of Eukratides' giant ancient coin on the European market.

This is a good approach. So little is known about ancient Baktria that there is no real story to tell. The second major idea of Lost World is a reminder of how much that we think we know about Hellenistic Baktria is now-discredited speculation. Holt's book will hopefully serve as a great "reboot" for the field of Baktrian studies.

Holt is critical of numismatic scholarship for continuing to focus the role coins play to uncover the ancient kings and battles. He believes that numismatics should move on, devising ways to deduce facts about ancient lifestyles. Statistical techniques are used to show technical errors on coins imply the coiners of ancient Ai Khanoum were probably stressed out as their civilization was dying.

The professor's critique of numismatic scholarship has some merit but he seems to paint numismatics with a single brush. So much of coin studies are done by or for collectors; it seems unfair to criticize the entire field for continuing to focus on kings.

Career academics probably do not need Holt's insights to revitalize the study of coins but perhaps collectors can consider forming interesting collections around topics other than lists of kings. People are starting to collect overstrikes. I know one advanced collector who has moved on to collecting coins made into tools and decorations in antiquity.

Recommended. Lost World of the Golden King: In Search of Ancient Afghanistan (Hellenistic Culture and Society)

Pan from Pantikapaion

To view this 4th or 3rd century BC head of Pan properly red/bluegreen 3D glasses should be used. Click to view at full resolution.

This image was created using two scans on a flatbed scanner and Photoshop. Gimp can also be used. This is my first attempt at Anaglyph 3D coin photography. For the technique I credit Gerald Marks. Yesterday I attended a workshop conducted by Professor Marks at Observatory in Brooklyn.

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.

Istros auction tomorrow

A major collection of the coins of Istros will be auctioned tomorrow in Switzerland by new firm First Auctions. There are also extensive Celtic lots. The coins are listed on Sixbid in addition to the vendor's own site. The vendor's site is terrible - no search and if you log in the images become unavailable.

Children's exhibit at Arizona Museum for Youth

An excellent museum exhibit on money and banking for young children is showing at the Arizona Museum for Youth in Mesa Arizona. The web site gives few details but my four-year-old loved it. The exhibit combines some wall art, including an improved bill by James Charles (not the Yoda one shown above though) with activities for children such as a glow-in-the-dark bank and designing paper currency with ink stamping. The exhibit runs through January 20th. There are special Saturday events but we just went on a regular museum day.

Countemporary Counterfeits Today

The Bichester Advertiser is reporting (no byline) on a counterfeit coin factory discovered by police in an active snooker hall.

Prosecuting, Colin McGregor alleged: “The defendant has spent in excess of £3,000 in order to create what is described as an ‘illicit mint’.” ... About 2,000 fake £1 coins were recovered, the court was told. Specialist officers also found a large amount of metal, as well as notepads allegedly with “stage by stage” instructions and diagrams showing how to make fake coins.

We rarely think about what happens to modern counterfeits after they are seized. One man had an idea but his dream was denied by the UK's Royal Mint. Stephanie Cureton reports for the Wirral Globe that

Plans to build a sculpture made entirely out of fake coins used at Merseyside’s tunnel booths have been scrapped. Merseytravel asked the Royal Mint for their approval to commission a special piece of art made out of counterfeit £1 coins. ... Councillor Steve Foulkes, who is part of the committee, had said he was “sceptical” about the prospect of such a piece of art.

Commenting on the newspaper's web site, a user identified only as Spiffy opined “no Turner prize for us.”

Obol (2012)

There is a raft filled with pennies in the East River. I didn't have my camera with me and can't find a thumbnail with usage rights to illustrate this post. There is a good photo of the thing on Flickr. It's by Jessica Feldman. She discusses it on her web site. It will be up until March 31, 2013.

Sterling Enclave

Sterling Enclave, a defunct blog fro July 2010, is one of the strangest New York numismatic web sites I have encountered.

An architecture student pondered the design of a clubhouse for numismatists in New York. In various entries he (or she?) visits the NY Fed, the ANS, and reads about the New York Numismatic Club. The student proposes a building shaped like a giant coin cabinet perched atop a pole.

LookTel Money Reader

LookTel Money Reader is a $9.99 iPhone app for the blind. Using the cameras phone it identifies dollar bills. There is support for the US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, and Australian Dollar. There is a cool minute-long YouTube video showing it in action.

5,500 counterfeit coins submitted yearly to PCGS

PCGS is reporting that they received 5,500 fake coins in the last twelve months. It costs about $25 to submit a coin, so no obviously false coins would have been part of this count. All 5500 coins were at least deceptive enough to fool typical collectors of slab-quality coins.

Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory

Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory is a supplier on Alibaba.com.

The factory's Alibaba page offers fifty different ancient coin types. I have not inspected any of them personally but a coin from the same dies as the one in the photograph above was published in 2007 by a noted Bulgarian scholar as genuine (I think... can't read Bulgarian).

This manufacturer claims to employ over 100 people at a factory at Qiuaid Town Industrial Estate, Yinzhou District, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China. Mr. Ruifang Wang is the contact.

Strangely the site claims to offer the coin in the photo for twenty cents, but with a minumum order of 10000 pieces. I have been wanting this particular fake since 2005 and only three have turned up on the market. If anyone does manage to contact the seller I'd love to purchase some specimens of this particular replica.

According to the seller's Alibaba page, “Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory is established in year 2000. We can make all kinds of fake ancient coins such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Biblical, Byzantine and Persian coins. All these coins are made from zinc alloy or brass material with antique silver or gold plated. We can produce fake coins and also metal gifts or metal souvenirs.”. This is apparently not a clandestine manufacturer, the seller warns “Illegal usage is not allowed. Please leave us alone if you want to use it for cheating.”

The future of money?

The Royal Canandian Mint is proposing a digital currency. A developer is showing some details.

Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter

I have been too busy to post. Mostly learning Ruby, not collecting unfortunately.

Anyway, I wanted to mention Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter. Amazon has the hardcover at $10 and the paperback at $6.

If the historical Isaac Newton had never become mint master the theme of this book would have been ridiculous. A 17th century 'police procedural' with the world's greatest scientist abandoning physics and become a proto-detective in London's underworld is really too silly for fiction. Yet it happened.

The book lacks photographs. Pages and pages are spent discussing hammered coins, why they could be clipped, and how they are different from milled coins. I would have appreciated a few photos but at least I know what the coins look like so it wasn't hard to follow the discussion. Levenson also explains the differences between good and poor quality fakes of hammered and milled coins, and discusses fake currency ('malt tickets'). I have never seen a fake English coins from this period and I've never seen a malt ticket, real or fake; photos of these would have been especially welcome.

I recommend the book highly.

Shutty's One Coin is Never Enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Greek obol modified in antiquity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Unicode 6.0 Money symbols

The Unicode standard has some new currency and banking symbols.

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

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

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

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

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

Ilya Prokopov on coin forgery

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

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

The solidus mark

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

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

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

Badly tooled Kushan coin

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

NAC auction import guarentee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3D scanning of ancient coins

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

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

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

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

Hilary Clinton's comments at MOU signing

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

Illegal export of old coins

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

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

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

Outrageous shipping and handling fee

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

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

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

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

Prospero Collection

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

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

Welcome Celator Readers

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

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

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

Why is the dollar coin unpopular?

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

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

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

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

Keyboard with new Rupee symbol

We have previously blogged about the new Rupee symbol.

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

New US platinum coin denomination?

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

CoinForgeryEbay

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

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

Shastri’s Introduction To Indian Coin Forgeries

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

Modern cast coinage

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

Visit to Ireland

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

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

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

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

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

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

F. Michael Fazzari on cast fakes

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

Use computers to calculate book prices

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

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

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

(via Marginal Revolution)

Ted Rall on the Liberty postage stamp and declining coin standards

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

The Cyrillic alphabet, when italicized, ... changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mugardos remonetizes peseta

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

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

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

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

He is now the happy owner of a sandwich toaster.

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

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

Museum exhibit on counterfeits (in Missouri)

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

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

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

Coins smuggled out of India

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

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

Counterfeit Euro coin detectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

CNG fall book sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goats in the bank are medically examined every week.

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

Full Disclosure

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Doyle relaunches CoinReplicas.com

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

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

Google Translate now supports Latin

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

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

Jewelry and furniture

Tine de Ruysser makes banknote jewelry.

When I make jewellery from valid banknotes, it is like making gold jewellery: everyone can see that the jewellery is worth money. The jewellery is pretty, and comes in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. The price changes accordingly.

All banknotes are valid currency at the time the jewellery is made. The banknotes are only folded and not damaged in any way: no cutting is used, nor is any glue applied. Each note can be unfolded and used as currency....

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

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

Highly descriptive title for a numismatic article

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

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

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

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

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

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

... the cash on the ice is recycled

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

Stolen Valor Act Held Unconstitutional

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

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

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

New symbol for the Indian Rupee

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

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

Article on fine art forgery in the New Yorker

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

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

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