Tom Cederlind Buy or Bid sale 142

Tom Cederlind's Buy or Bid Sale #142, with 358 lots, is online now. Closes April 5th.

Copyrighting individual coin descriptions

The e-Sylum reported yesterday on David Hewett's story on the auction description copyright lawsuit between Heritage and Superior.

Hewett's article shows examples where the same word patterns are used first in Heritage catalogs and then in Superior catalogs, for example in describing an 1879 gold Stella:

The regal beauty of this curious denomination has kept demand very high for an attractive example, such as the coin offered here, and many numismatists have long desired to own such a prize. However, the price of ownership seems to continue to outpace all but those who greatly desire and can afford the cost required to secure an example. Here is an opportunity for yet another collector to fulfill the dream of finally obtaining one of America’s most popular and unusual denominations ever produced.

Heritage, February 23, 2005

The regal beauty of this curious denomination has kept demand very high for an attractive example, such as the coin offered here, and many numismatists have long desired to own such a prize. However, the price of ownership seems to continue to outpace all but those who greatly desire and can afford the cost required to secure an example. Here is an opportunity for yet another collector to fulfill the dream of finally obtaining one of America’s most popular and unusual denominations ever produced.

Superior, September 29, 2006

The problem is that Superior hired an ex-Heritage cataloger, James Jones. It is difficult for a person not to sound like himself when describing the same coin type! This case reminds me of the famous "stealing from himself" lawsuit against rock singer/composer John Fogerty. In that case, a manager who owned part of an old song's copyright sued the singer for rights to a new song that sounded a lot like the old one.

Collectors want the descriptions of similar coins to look similar. If every cataloger put creativity into every description there would be no way to compare descriptions. For example, one of the examples in the suit uses “glossy chocolate-brown surfaces” to describe a colonial Vermont copper. We don't want one dealer using 'chocolate-brown', another using 'coffee', another using 'mocha', another using 'mahogany', etc.

For longer prose descriptions like the Stella quote above it may make sense to ban re-use of descriptions by catalogers who change firms. I don't know. I don't want a large settlement scaring other auction houses into bizarre sentence construction and new adjectives. (I'd also like to see catalogers get bylines on catalogs.)

Israel cracks down on delinquent diggers

A short item by Roger Atwood on Israel's demands that licensed diggers publish their findings. (via PhDiva, who notes that Egypt adopted a similar policy.)

Atwood's book on looting was recently remaindered and can be purchased cheaply at Oxbow books.

United States bans collecting of military medals

The United States banned collecting of military medals on December 20, 2006. It's illegal to purchase, sell, mail, ship, import, or export any service medal, badge, ribbon, or imitation.

A long article by David Hewett in the March issue of Maine Antique Digest covers the law and the response in the medal collecting community.

http://www.maineantiquedigest.com/articles/mar07/medals0307.htm

The anti-collecting law was part of the Stolen Valor Act, an attempt to ban the practice of fraudulently wearing unearned medals. The anti-collecting provisions were the result of over-zealous bill-writing. The article says the Orders and Medals Society of America (OMSA) had its members contact their representatives, which was almost successful -- there were promises of changing the wording of the bill to allow collectors and museums to continue acquiring the pieces. Unfortunately the law passed with the original anti-collector anti-museum wording.

The OMSA website carries further details.

I am surprised that this law was proposed, debated, and passed without my knowledge. I first learned of it this morning!

I do not support con men wearing imitation Purple Hearts but it should be legal for a soldier or heir to donate medals to the local history museum and send them the medal to the museum through the US mail. It should be legal to make and sell replica medals to Hollywood directors making war movies. Schools where they train engravers to make future medals should be able to obtain representative styles of medals. Why not just keep capitalism legal, and ban merely the practice of wearing a medal with intent to deceive?

New accusations in Veliko Tarnovo Museum coin robbery

Michel van Rijn has a new post on the Veliko Tarnovo Museum robbery of last year, written by Arthur Brand. Van Rijn's site links to this blog because we wrote about Bulgarian reports last year. Brand's post claims to give the names of the robbers. It also claims the coins were moved through eBay sellers 'Pagane' and 'Silenos'.

A better source than this blog for details on the case is this FORVM post.

I haven't been keeping up with the story but there doesn't seem to be anything new other than Brand's accusations. Google has a new News Archive Search; searches there for /Veliko Tarnovo robbery/ offer few details. Most of the details are behind paywalls, and seem to be repostings of the material that came out early last year.

The Sofia Echo claims to have reported, in April, on calls for the museum director to step down. Apparently he did; in September the Echo suggested that the proposed new director of the museum, Hristo Haritonov, might be underqualified. That doesn't make any sense, because Mr. Haritonov was already the director! Perhaps the dates are wrong on the Echo's web site, or I misunderstood before and Mr. Haritonov did get a promotion in August.

(Mr. Haritonov is a numismatist and writer. His books include Coins in the Bulgarian Folk Culture (c. XV-XVII). He also wrote the paper “Semiotic Aspects of the Monetary Iconography in the Context of the Medieval Bulgarian Culture” which was published in the museum's journal.) I have never read these books and would be curious to know if they are highly regarded.)

Anyway, both the police and museum claim to have photos of the stolen coins. It should be a simple matter to check eBay's records. I would have preferred the release of the photos allowing the public to help in the search. Maybe Brand is wrong and the coins are still out there? It would be wonderful if Brand has cracked the case but I am skeptical. I don't recall these eBay dealers moving a better or different product than their usual offerings any time in 2006.

I look forward to more details as they are uncovered.

Harlan J Berk sale 153

Harlan J. Berk sale 153 is online. 442 ancient coins, plus antiquities.

The catalog arrived today. If there was an email announcing this sale I missed it.

Numismatic literature

This month's Celator contains a full-page 'People in the News' segment on new firm Douaglas Saville Numismatic Books. Kerry Wetterstrom talks highly of Saville's FPL No. 1.

A highlight of the FPL is the complete set of 17 Ars Classica/Naville auction catalogs bound in eight volumes (£2200). Kerry Wetterstrom, apparently quoting Saville, calls this series the “single most important series of auction sales relating to Greek coins ever published.”

I wonder why? Although I've seen the catalogs in person at Charles Davis's NYINC booth I've been afraid to open them up and look at them. What makes them worth $200 each?

These catalogs have about 1500-3500 lots and 30-100 plates. That was a lot of photographs for their day, but modern catalogs reach that. Modern catalogs are in color and free.

Some auction catalogs are purchased by literature collectors who want the catalog as an object. I am interested in catalogs for the information they carry. A finite budget forces me to be selective. How shall I choose which old catalogs to acquire?

Warren Esty's site discusses the merits of ancient coin auction catalogs. Mr. Esty has done a great service to the coin collector by inventing a series of codes to compactly describe the focus of ancient coin auction catalogs. For each catalog in his collection he tells us how many Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Celtic coins are presented. He has also invented codes for the quality of the coins inside (he uses MV, HV, and VHV, which mean $, $$, and $$$!) and for the presentation of the catalog (photography, printing, etc). If a catalog has a special focus (a city or denomination) he calls that out.

I wish book dealers would adopt Mr. Esty's codes.

Hiding valuables in your home

A burglar offers advice on hiding valuables.

Gorny & Mosch auctions 155-7

Gorny & Mosch auctions 155, 156, and 157 catalogs are online. Auctions are held 5-8 March 2007.

Kolbe auction 102

The Kolbe auction 102 catalog is online. 707 numismatic books. Closes March 15th.

Books (non-numismatic)

Forbes: The 10 Most Expensive Books Of 2006 (via Books Found blog).

Half of the top ten were geographical works by classical authors!

There is a $10/month service called ScoutPal that allows you to look up Amazon Marketplace value of books and CDs from your cell phone.

Slang of the Book Trade: part one and part two, from the great new Bookride blog.

Coin database formats

The Vatican Library's coin collection is coming online, with photographs. Many papal coins and medals are already viewable. The Vatican has chosen to use MARC 21 as their metadata format.

A coin database needs fields for the attributes that can be searched. Sebastian Heath and Andrew Meadows have created the Numismatic Metadata Project to determine the ideal fields for numismatic metadata.

Existing databases, like the Moneta, ISEGRIM, and Tantalus Coins (no direct link to their database format) use whatever fields the authors and users wanted.

For librarians and computer scientists this is a problem. It makes it difficult to combine databases when the fields have slightly different meanings. I wish Heath and Meadows success in uniting the field with a single proposal with strictly defined meanings for each field.

Achieving concensus on design is difficult because different users expect different things. For example, I often use coin databases to identify coins from partial inscriptions. I'd like a numismatic database to contain information on individual letter characteristics, such as serif vs. sans-serif, and orientation (vertical, horizontal, clockwise, etc.) Most users won't want to even see that on the screen - so why put it in the database?

Restrictions on Cypriot coins

By now you've read that the government of Cyprus wishes to add 'coins more than 250 years old' to the list of restricted cultural objects making it illegal to import such items without a license from Cyprus and requiring our Customs and Border Patrol to be on the lookout for such coins.

Hopefully you've also read Wayne Sayles' response.

I'd like to see a world where numismatists can send coins across borders for study — a Numismatic Free Trade Agreement — and don't like it when governments try to restrict the sale of old coins.

This agreement is more than just a restriction that burdens coin collectors. Adding coins to Cyprus' list means that our customs agents will need to learn to recognize the coins of Cyprus.

Customs is a hard job. (Here is a nice How Customs Works that explains what the officers do.) It's best if the list of things the agents need to monitor is small. It isn't hard to recognize a gun or a brick of cocaine. Recognizing Cypriot coins is harder than detecting guns. Obviously a smuggler isn't going to write 'auto parts' on a shipment of coins. He is going to write something like 'recent silver tokens'. The Customs agent will need to study the difference, leaving little time to look for guns and bricks of cocaine.

When the Iraqi museum was robbed the state department put out a list of stolen Iraqi artifacts, including coins. This was a problem, because no coins were stolen! The list is still there, but now says 'Present, Stolen or Missing'. (Coins are 'Present', but you wouldn't know it from the site.) Look at the 'Islamic Coins' and 'Parthian Coins' on that website. This is the kind of information that will be given to Customs agents.

There is a pre-existing agreement for Byzantine metal antiquities with Cyprus; the images are here. If coins are added you can expect to see 'Greek', 'Byzantine', and 'Medieval' coins added to that list. Having coins on the list means Customs Agent will be spending a lot of time opening boxes when the X-ray shows coins. Recent and old coins look similar under the X-ray.

More Google

Jeffrey Toobin reports on Google's Moon Shot in next week's The New Yorker.

According to the article, Google plans to scan at least 32 million volumes, and be finished within ten years. The article estimates the cost of this at $800,000,000; elsewhere I've read numbers as low as $100,000,000 million.

“Previously, when people have done scanning, they always were constrained by their budget and their scale,” Clancy told me. “They had to spend all this time figuring out which were the perfect ten thousand books, so they spent as much time in selection as in scanning. All the technology out there developed solutions for what I’ll call low-rate scanning. There was no need for a company to build a machine that could scan thirty million books. Doing this project just using commercial, off-the-shelf technology was not feasible. So we had to build it ourselves.”

A few years ago I was begging Frank Campbell to let me scan some titles at the ANS library. He had so many concerns I hinted that it might be better for me to just wait for Google. Frank seemed surprised that I would believe Google would scan numismatic works and auction catalogs.

As the article implies, Google doesn't have a choice. They cannot afford to decide which books are worthy of scanning. At $30 to scan a book it's cheaper to scan than to pay a graduate student to decide which books are worth scanning! If librarians in any of Google's member libraries thought a title was worth acquisitioning then it'll be on Google.

What won't be there? 20th century auction catalogs? Anything else?

In related news, Google's copyright lawyer has a blog.

Maps from books

Google's blog announced yesterday the addition of automatically generated maps for books.

For example, suppose you are reading the anonymous catalog International Medallic Exhibition of the American Numismatic Society. Click on 'About this book' and a new section, 'Places mentioned in this book' appears. It's a map of the world, with red pins sticking into it.

One of the pins is over Texas. Hover over the pin and a tooltip reading "Sabine Pass, Texas" appears. Click on the Texas pin and a balloon appears with an excerpt showing the details of medal 3395 and a page number. Click on the page number and page 242 appears with 'Sabine Pass, Texas' highlighted.

Not only is the technology amazing, but completely automated. No bibliographer typed in a list of cities into Google. An Artificial Intelligence figured this out on its own.

The flaws in this techology are obvious. Also on page 242 is a Washington medal of New Orleans, but New Orleans doesn't appear on the map. Presumably Google's software is looking for "(city), (state)" and "(city), (country)" patterns. It hasn't yet been taught the "(important city)" pattern.

It's an important start. I look forward to that day when Google can extract the ancient cities - polis - and map Greek coin books.

Counterfeit detection pens

Excellent article on how counterfeit detector pens work.

The pens detect the starch content in money. Regular paper has starch, currency paper doesn't.

Magician and skeptic James Randi uses an ironing product, spray starch, that makes genuine bills appear counterfeit. Then he returns the starched bills to the bank. Eventually someone will attempt to pass the genuine but starched bill, leading to police, siezed money, etc.

Legal and Ethical Issues in Ancient Numismatics

I hadn't noticed this before, but last year the ANS added 'Legal and Ethical Issues in Ancient Numismatics' to the reading list for the Eric P. Newman Graduate Seminar. (This is the seminar the ANS offers on numismatics to graduate students in related fields like Classics and Archeology.)

It's an interesting list.

The ANS's own statement on cultural property is here.

Sonic Fingerprints Safeguard Art

A report by Nicole Martinelli, Sonic Fingerprints Safeguard Art, discusses Pietro Cosentino's invention of 'sonic fingerprinting' for antiquities.

Professor Cosentino attached sensors to an ancient funeral url, then tapped the urn with a small rubber hammer. The sensors recorded the vibrations. The idea is to create a 'fingerprint' of the interior structure of the urn.

According to the report, the technique works on stone, wood and ceramics. Not metal, so this wouldn't be a good technique for examining ancient coins.

Ancient coins has a similar technique called the 'ring test'. The coin is struck and a human listens for a ringing sound. Reid Goldsborough explains the test. It's used for detecting cast counterfeits and to check for crystalization.

Could a quantitative test be developed for ancient metallic objects? Perhaps something with a tuning fork and very accurate measurement of sound waves or object vibrations? I suspect such a test would reveal very little about coins of good metal, but perhaps would be of use for measuring crystalization or patina composition.

(via Harvard Art Law News).

“I'd like nothing better than to do a film on the antiquities trade.”

Part 2 of Suzan Mazur's interview with Bruce McNall.

McNall talks about the antiquities market, Hecht, Numismatic Fine Arts, and the Hunt brothers, as well as his new movie Alpha Dog starring Bruce Willis, Justin Timberlake and Sharon Stone.

Right Wing Coin Geek

Dealer Jim McGarigle (Polymath Numismatics) has a new blog, Right Wing Coin Geek. In today's post he explains how he prices ancient coins. He also touches on misattribution and rarity.