It was nice to read about the C4 Newsletter being available on the Newman Numismatic Portal. I'm thrilled The Numismatist is available to ANA members online! So much information is available at our fingertips in seconds. Crosby & Maris had to do it the old-fashioned way... the mail and telegraph and personal travel. What we can learn immediately took them weeks or months, making theirs (and others') accomplishments all the more impressive!

I share Les Citrome's disappointment in the inability to download complete back issues of The Numismatist. One morning a few days before the December 1 "grand opening" I visited the ANA website and was able to download all the issues intact from June 2014 to the present. During that process I noticed that all issues from, I believe, 2009 on were also available, but I had to leave the computer for a couple of hours. When I came back, expecting to complete my set back to 2009, everything was gone except what I had been able to download. Now we have to settle for downloading one or two pages at a time. It is not what I had hoped for and expected, especially in these days of being able to have complete sets of things such as the C4 Newsletter, Penny-Wise, and Colonial Newsletter available to read almost as if having the periodical in hand. The current arrangement requires us to have a topic or keyword in mind, whereas having an entire issue or series of entire issues at hand allows for those Eureka! moments of serendipitous learning.

I have the complete back files in hard copy of American Heritage, Fine Woodworking, and the Civil War Token Journal. I love to pull them down from their shelves, sling back in the recliner, and travel to the past. But those collections occupy about twenty lineal feet of shelving, and I can't imagine what 127 years of The Numismatist or Numismatic Scrapbook might require. Lucky you if you have them and the space to house them, but most of us do not. A complete, digital copy is the next best thing, but as you observed, it requires a lot of squinting.