Part of the mystery regarding author Starr Gilmore has been solved by Bob Olson of Springfield, IL. He reports that Starr’s given first name was Melvin (S. Gilmore), born Aug. 6, 1903 and died in Spokane, Washington in June 1977. To date no one has been able to locate any articles other than those cited by Darryl Atchison in his posting for E-Sylum. Might someone in the Spokane area remember Gilmore? The search continues. Thanks for your help.

I subscribed to Robert Heath's books on New England states commemorative medals of cities and towns. He did not want to waste paper so he would sell updates to his books that just replaced pages that were outdated and added new pages for new finds. It was a complicated task to get his updated pages and go thru each state inserting the new and tossing out the old pages.

For example, the book on Connecticut is listed as Volume 1, seventh edition with the last updates I received. The books were not bound and were issued as loose pages punched for a three ring binder. (I found that old Franklin Day Planner binders worked great for this purpose.) I would be surprised if there are very many complete sets of these issues due to the work required to keep them all up to date.

I have books for Connecticut Vol. 1, 7th Ed.; Maine Vol. 1, 6th Ed.; New Hampshire Vol. 1, 7th Ed.; Vermont 5th Ed.; Massachusetts Vol. 1, 10th; Vol 2, 10th Ed.; Vol 3 10th Ed.; Vol 4 10th Ed.; and Rhode Island 5th Ed.

In the last E-Sylum, you mentioned Zimbabwe notes. Attached is an article I wrote in 2011 about the Zimbabwe notes (and a few others) .

In the article Quiz Answer: City of New Orleans (from Volume 16, Number 53, December 29, 2013), it was mentioned that ABC got the name of their show Good Morning America from the song's chorus.

Talk about revisionist history! This is something that ABC would like people to believe but that is the furthest thing from the truth. ABC stole the name from a morning talk show Good Morning that was on WCVB, their Boston affiliate.

This video from 1989 has Bob Bennett who was the General Manager of WCVB from 1972-82 talks about (start video at 6:06) how he almost got into a fist fight with Fred Silverman who was at the time the head of ABC Entertainment over ABC taking the title without asking WCVB first. As a result WCVB had to change the name of their show from Good Morning to Good Day.

In the January 12, 2014 issue of The Esylum, the title of earliest coin dealer telephone number was awarded to Thomas Elder for his September 1908 listing of Grammercy 5899. Perhaps this is the earliest telephone listing of an American coin dealer, but the title banner of the December 1892 issue of Spink's Numismatic Circular states, "Telephone: 1327". This was the first issue of the Numismatic Circular, so I can't say how long they may have had that number in service. I suspect that both this English record and Elder's American record would fall if anyone was interested enough to do a bit of research.

For another beautiful example see this Phocaean coin (same time period):

Very interesting indeed - I had never seen it before your newsletter on the Philistine coin. The Phocaean image is described as a young satyr having lifted a mask of Silenus at the end of a dance. That may be the origin of the motif, but as it appears on the coin the mask is not delineated as such, and the design really seems to be of the optical illusion variety.

Aren't punctuation fanatics called "dingbats"?