Welcome to The E-Sylum: Volume 2, Number 35: August 27, 1999: an electronic publication of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society. E-SYLUM PUBLISHING SCHEDULE While this newsletter is normally sent out Sunday evenings, we've had some slight deviations recently while yours truly works around travel constraints. This week's letter is a bit early as I'm leaving for a week's vacation with my family. The normal publishing schedule should resume in September. While I won't be able to answer until I return, keep your email coming in the meantime - your input is a key to the success of this newsletter. SUBSCRIBER UPDATES Our newest subscribers are literature dealers John Bergman and NBS Vice President David Sklow. Welcome aboard! We've lost Adam Sterling, whose email address is no longer active. It's been a short week, with no other new subscribers, so our subscriber count is now 204. FRANK KATEN UPDATE At the NBS meeting at the ANA convention, John Huffman reported that retired numismatic literature dealer Frank Katen was living in a nursing home. Now John offers the following update: "I saw Laurese last Tuesday, and she told me Frank was much improved, is eating well, walking around the nursing home with the help of a cane, and is complaining about too many bosses. She was hopeful he would come home in a week or two." LITERATURE PRICELISTS AVAILABLE Richard Stockley's latest numismatic literature pricelist is available via email - he may be reached at this email address: stockley@total.net Karl Moulton of Great American Sales reports that his "new fixed price list of 20th century US auction catalogues is now ready. Any E-sylum subscriber can get one free if they are not already customers. Will be shipped out the first of next week." Contact Karl via email at Numiscats@worldnet.att.net GARRETT COLLECTION CORRESPONDENCE Earlier this month, on the Numislit mailing list, subscriber Michael Berkman posted the following note: "I had the pleasure of going to the Garretts' beautiful residence in Baltimore, the Evergreen house (pictured on covers of B&R Garrett I-IV). Housed therein are the Garretts' correspondence with all the dealers and organizations of the time. I had the privilege of examining these, which are all housed in file folders in the basement of the house. The letters are simply fascinating. One can truly learn much about the numismatic scene from the 1870s through 1940s from those letters. Among the personalities represented in the correspondence files were the Chapman brothers, W. Elliot Woodward, Wayte Raymond, B. Max Mehl, David Proskey, Burdette G. Johnson, Thomas Elder, J. Colvin Randall, Harold P. Newlin and even Anthony C. Paquet. Although Bowers copied some key letters into The History of U.S. Coinage as Illustrated by the Garrett Collection, some terrific letters were omitted. The book is no replacement for viewing the files in person, which brings me to my next point. Since only half a dozen people (per the museum's estimate) have viewed the letters in the last 20 years, should they be sold? In their current space, they are kept in a dark dungeon-like room in old rusty file cabinets. In my opinion, they should either be transcribed into a book or sold. The numismatic community should have access to items such as these, as no comparable series of numismatic letters and telegrams exists." Dan Freidus responded, in part: "A half dozen scholars viewing material over a 20 year period doesn't sound like such light usage that an archive would want to discard the letters. Remember that when Walter Breen started his work for Wayte Raymond in the National Archives in the 1950s, he worked with documents that hadn't been looked at by ANYONE in 150 years." Other people commenting generally agreed that the archive should not be dispersed, and suggested indexing, transcribing, publishing, and/or donating them to a numismatic library such as ANS. CORRECTION: VAGI BOOK ON ROMAN COINAGE Michael Marotta of Coin World quickly corrected my note on David Vagi's upcoming book on The History and Coinage of the Roman Empire: "I do not understand how Sam Kazmi can "announce" the publication of David Vagi's new book on Roman Coins. The book is being published by Coin World." I quickly apologized for the misrepresentation - I had taken much of the text from Kazmi's electronic press release, which was the first place I'd seen a reference to the book. Suellen Ruttkay, Product Manager for the book, notes that Coin World won't begin promoting it until closer to the time the book is available, "... the end of September at the earliest. I think, due to the excitement about the book, some people [i.e., non-Coin World people] have jumped the gun." Upon rereading Kazmi's announcement, it does say "taking advance orders", but doesn't mention a publisher. So, our apologies to Coin World; we'll patiently await the book's arrival. BIBLIOGRAPHY UPDATE The following new sections on modern coinages have been added to the NBS online numismatic bibliography by Larry Mitchell. The bibliography resides on our web site: http://www.coinbooks.org/ 70. New Zealand, The Philippines, Australasia & Oceana 71. Japan, Korea & Southeast Asia 72. India 73. China "GREAT DEBATE" CLIFFHANGER Subscriber Alan Luedeking of Florida writes: "Don't keep us on tenterhooks with these tantalizing tidbits! Tell us the real story for crying out loud! Since when has NBS ever been shy? Don't pull any punches -- name names and recount the verbal battles-- heck, some of us had to work and couldn't be there!! ;-)" Well, it was quite a show, but would take far more space than we have in this newsletter to tell. Fortunately, Joel Orosz took copious notes, and he plans to write an article for The Asylum. Also, this week's Coin World (September 6, 1999 issue) has a front-page article on the event, plus another article based on John Ford's talk the following day. Both articles were written by Coin World Editor Beth Deisher. Meanwhile, J. C. Spillman offers the following observations on the topic: "I attended the original Hodder presentation of his material at the ANS Groves symposium last April and, in my opinion, Mike’s presentation was exemplary - detailed, cautious, professional and was presented with great finesse and with considerable technical backup by analytical testing conducted by Dr. John Chervinsky at Harvard using a technique known as PIXE - - (P)roton (I)nduced (X)ray (E)mission spectography.. I must agree with Mike’s observations in E-Sylum Vol 2, No.34 as well as my own conclusions that “grave charges were made (by Buttrey) on superficial research” to quote John W. Adams from his Coin World guest commentary. I guess that I totally agree with John, as well." ANA EXHIBIT WINNERS Several E-Sylum subscribers brought exhibit awards home from the ANA. (My apologies if I've left anyone out). Of special note is one of our newest subscribers, young numismatist Eric Li Cheung who bagged a 1st place award in the most highly contested category, Class 1: United States Coins, for his exhibit on "The Circulating Irish Coppers in Colonial America." Congratulations, Eric! Other winners: Class 4; Tokens: Second-Place - Pete Smith for "Personification on Conder Tokens" Class 12: Latin American Numismatics: Second-Place - Tom DeLorey for "Honduras Coinage from 1610 to 6188" Class 14: General or Specialized: Second-Place - Robert F. Fritsch for "Numismatica Sherlockiana" Class 15: Private Mint Issues since 1960: First-Place - Sam Deep for "The Story of the Pitt Bicentennial Medal" Class 22: Numismatic Literature: First-Place - Lawrence Sekulich for "A Bibliographic Introduction to Collecting Ancient Greek Coins" Congratulations to all! (and please consider planning an exhibit for the Numismatic Literature category next year! ) SURVEY FEEDBACK The E-Sylum received high marks from survey respondents. 34 surveys were returned, about 20% of the subscriber base at that time. Features were ranked by respondents on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 = "great!", 5 = "hate it". The average score was about a 2. The higher-scoring features were nearly universally liked. The lower-scoring features got mixed marks, and the associated comments indicate that differences are generally due to differing needs of the readers. With favorite features listed first, here are the results - (average score), feature name: (1.87) Literature Sale announcements (1.97) Asylum Updates (1.97) Subscriber Profiles (2.03) Research Requests (2.03) Bibliography Updates (2.05) Featured Web Site (2.10) Subscriber Profiles Some respondents didn't care for the Featured Web site, but many others gave it top grades and raved in their comments. Similarly, some are indifferent to the Subscriber Updates, but others said they enjoy seeing who's coming into the fold. Generally, it seems The E-Sylum ain't broke, so we won't fiddle with it much at this time. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome, though. Thanks to all our survey respondents for taking the time to complete the survey, and thanks to all our contributors for helping to make this work. FEATURED WEB SITE This week's feature is an online article about a previously featured web site, Where's George, the site which tracks the journey of dollar bills via the efforts of volunteers who record serial numbers of the bills passing through their hands. And your friends think collecting coin books is weird... http://www.wired.com/news/news/culture/story/21395.html Wayne Homren Numismatic Bibliomania Society The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. For more information please see our web site at http://www.coinbooks.org/ There is a membership application available on the web site. To join, print the application and return it with your check to the address printed on the application. For those without web access, contact Dave Hirt, NBS Secretary-Treasurer, 5911 Quinn Orchard Road, Frederick, MD 21701 (To be removed from this mailing list write to me at whomren@coinlibrary.com)
