I was saddened to learn of the passing of Mike Metras. He took my class on Biblical Numismatics at the ANA in the mid 1990s and we stayed in contact for awhile after that. For awhile he would send me, either by email or snail mail, tales of his travels, links to his writings etc. He will be missed.

Please pass on my thanks to the readers who helped identify the cuttings. I handled the book last week and have begun to go through it. It seems to have been written in 1710s. There are more cuttings and drawings in it. It will take me awhile to go through it. Thanks again.

As a collector of medals of the French Regime in the New World by Betts, I have run across several of these medals that are slabbed. I won't express a view on slabbing, except to say I have purchased a few, 2 or 3, I think... and I have cracked them out of the cases.

If these grading services are going to slab medals, I think that they need to give more information; with these medals you need to know: are the edges beveled, filed, rounded, square edge, plain edge restrikes, or restrikes? If a restrike, one needs to know what the edge mark is: ie: cornucopia, bee, pointing hand, prow of a galley/ship, anchor and without this information one cannot tell anything about the medal.

They should be mounted in a holder where the edge is visible and information is properly noted. Medals are far different from coins.

I don't collect coins; never have, only Canadian tokens and now, medals. That's it !!! I'm not against slabbing, as folks have a right to do what they want - it's just not for me!!!!

Regarding Len Augsburger's suggestion that the Walter Breen "merde" tale may be apocryphal, perhaps it didn't make it to final print but was stopped when noticed by Coin World's editor. That still could have been grounds for firing, since it was probably not the first time Breen ruffled some feathers there. The name of his column, "Bristles and Barbs," says a lot about its content.

Though CW dropped Breen's column in 1965 it was picked up by Krause Publications' COINS Magazine shortly afterward and ran under the same title for several more years. This is where I first saw it when I began reading coin periodicals about 1970.

Having read George Kolbe's recollections about conditions of books prompted me to recall the time when I was at Spink's, and it must have been in the mid-1970s, when I was asked to visit a rather grand house, or, rather, mini palace, in a very smart part of London. The owner, I was told, was a Maharajah, or was it a Maharanee ?, from an Indian State, who had a "beautiful library of many hundreds of books on all kinds of subjects…", and the main point was that they were all in "fantastic and wonderful leather bindings". They had been brought back from India, and more importantly, the owner wanted to sell them.

At the time I was dealing in all kinds of rare books at Spinks- we had published 5 or 6 catalogues of such books and we, that is Spink, were gaining a reputation for handling good things…… Anyhow, I made an appointment, visited the house, and was shown into the dimly-lit library. It looked fantastic - at a first glance…… And I started to wonder just how we could handle such a treasure-trove……

Then I began to take a volume or two off the shelves…… and, to my horror, they were all, yes, all, were eaten by worms, termites, and all manner of undesirable creatures, and the bindings and all the contents were destroyed, rending the "wonderful library" worthless. The big lesson I learned was that one must look at everything, when one is looking at a library - the chance is one might find treasures, but on the other hand, life can be full of disappointments.

Since you are running "Family Circle" cartoons, here's the Jumble from today's paper, with some numismatic content. I won't spoil it! But I will send the answer next week.

It is a Big Mac Rip Off.

You may be too young to remember Winky's. When I was a lifeguard in 1962-63 we got BIG WINKS at Winky's on McKnight Road on the way back from North Park. Delligatti may have changed the sauce recipe slightly, but otherwise the bun and two patty structure was the same. He was not an inventor but merely put the Chinese adoption method to work for himself.

Groucho also had a plan for a seven cent nickel.