What a super slate of officers. The Board should be expanded, if needed, to accommodate them all! A gathering of eagles!

A fruitful avenue of research would be to check into luggage or baggage tags (and indeed the word at the top of the token looks like it could be 'baggage'. There was a 1913-1914 court case of Boston Railroad vs. Hooker which actually states "Baggage liability is limited to personal baggage not to exceed one hundred dollars in value for a passenger" which reads pretty darned close to what is visible on the token itself.

The Civil War Token Society (CWTS), Token and Medal Society (TAMS) and Medal Collectors of America (MCA) are hosting a Money Talks presentation on Thursday, 3:00 pm at the American Numismatic Association in Denver this August titled ASK THE EXPERTS! A SYMPOSIUM ON THE ALLURE OF TOKENS AND MEDALS. I'm moderating a panel featuring David Schenkman, Bill Hyder, Steve Hayden, Neil Musante and Q. David Bowers. We would love your readers to submit their questions for the event to me via email at susantrask@mindspring.com or write to me at P.O. Box 2053, Sister, Or. 97759.

A colleague has a Mayflower medallion, silver, 1620-1970. Obverse the ship, reverse a map of east coast America. He is curious about some edge marking - STERLING H d over m 70P 02896.

The 'sterling' is obvious, but not much else, capital H, lowercase d over lowercase m? That's all greek to me. Can someone help?

I, too, have studied the “investment returns” on coins, specifically US early coppers. The main finding was that you can make coins look like a fabulous or very poor investment by cherrypicking your starting and ending dates. Yes, generally prices rise, but there always seem to be several years of stagnation between price increases. The result of that is that you can make coins look like a fabulous investment or a poor one depending on what dates you choose to begin and end your study. Because of this, all such studies are biased.

Of course, any study of coin price performance over time has another important flaw: it has zero predictive power.

So, collect coins because you enjoy them. If you’re lucky, you might buy and sell at favorable points in the cycle. Of course, collectors collect over a period of time, so it is highly unlikely that the bulk of your collection will have been bought at a favorable point in the cycle. You can protect yourself somewhat by buying series that have a strong collector base and by buying quality within a grade/price range, but luck is a key to successful “investing" in coins.

Finally, please let me indulge my personal pet peeve a propos price/performance plots (and my love for alliteration). For some reason, too many of them are shown on linear scales. They mean nothing unless they are plotted on a semi-log scale. A change from $1-2 is exactly the same rate of return as a change from $1M-2M.

I may have missed it but I don’t see anywhere in your items on the Young America Furnace Company notes the fact that the top note seems to mis-printed. It has an upside down “n” in the title making it 'Yonng' rather than 'Young'.

The error also appears on the 5 cent denomination.

Besides the interesting articles I usually find something worthy of reprinting (with permission of course) in The Shekel. But this time I found something else--it sure looks like ET peeking out, with a spidery body, on the reverse of a daric. Did anyone else spot this?