I have a question that I hope the E-Sylum readers can give me some information on. Recently I bought a small 4 X 6 inch auction catalog. I thought it was cute because of its small size. It was an auction by W.H. Livingston of Ebensburg, PA on January 28,1939.

I did not expect it to have too much content, but was quite surprised at the rather amazing quality of the material offered - Flying Eagle and Indian cents, each date in proof. Two cents complete in proof except small motto. Three cent nickels complete in proof. Three cent silver Uncirculated until 1856, after that in proof. Five cent nickels 1866-1912 complete in proof except 1867 with rays. The rest of the sale was also top quality.

My question is, do any of our readers have information on this dealer, and were all his catalogs this small size?

XF-AU $10 series 1929 national bank note on the Chase National Bank of New York, found in a military payroll in Grafenwoehr, Germany in 1965 or 1966. Naturally I did not pay it out, but bought it with a $10 that I fortunately had in my wallet that day.

Please refer to the article referenced below. I first heard about this on National Public Radio, though I can't find that particular report on their site.

In January of 1995 I learned of the article in The New York Times Magazine on .The Posture Photo Scandal. by Ron Rosenbaum. At the time I was working in records management for a large international law firm that had a New York office. I contacted the records manager in New York to see if he could provide a copy of that issue. It came a few days later through our inter-office mail. I hope the New York staff accepted my explanation about why I was interested in an article about nude photos.

Since I have copies of the referenced publications, I can offer a few comments.

1. Sheldon's The Varieties of Human Physique, published in 1940, has only photos of nude men. Their faces and genitals are obscured.

2. Sheldon published his Atlas of Men in 1954. His proposed Atlas of Women was never published.

3. The cover of The New York Times Magazine does include a head shot of Hillary Rodham and she is mentioned in the article. Of note is this from page 40: .By the time Hillary Rodham arrived on the Wellesley campus, women were allowed to have their pictures taken only partially nude..

4. The article by Rosenbaum indicates that others besides Sheldon cooperated in several Ivy League schools. Sheldon would not have taken the Wellesley pictures.

My conclusion from this: Although Hillary was at Wellesley at the right time to participate, her picture was not nude and was never published. I don.t have Will Nipper.s book to read his exact language. The comment about Hillary Clinton is either incorrect or misinterpreted.

Tom Carson and I are working on at book on Tennessee scrip book because most of it has not been cataloged. We identified a maverick - a piece of scrip from Lafayette; no state is printed on the note. It's a ten cent scrip for Frank's Restaurant (printed), signed Rueben H. Frank(?) Oct 27. 1862 "Secured by Money in Safe" Pay bearer 10 cents when presented in sums of one dollar or more. No vignettes. Printers design across left side.

The piece was sold by R. M. Smythe auction (#272 lot 3647 in Memphis 7/7/2007) from the Schingoethe collection as was cataloged in Tennessee. There is Lafayette, TN in Macon County but the local historian cannot find a record of Frank's Restaurant or the signature Reuben H. Frank during the period. Signature is weak.

I checked the obsolete books I have (SC, TN, AL, AK, MS, FL) and the GA obsolete website and did not find it. If you recognize it let me know. My email address is dennis@schafluetzel.org

At my request Dennis provided an image of the scrip note. -Editor

Regarding the counterfeit one-pound coins circulating in the UK, the image of the 2002 example illustrated in the article as genuine likewise appears to be a fake. Perhaps, it's just a bad photo, but it doesn't look good to me.

Here are images of the reverse of a $100 2003 series A note. This is the first time I've seen something like this....has this note possibly been across the water? These stamps remind me of chopmarks on coins.

Here at Harlan Berk's coin store in downtown Chicago, it is not unusual to see $50 and $100 bills with small rubber stamps on them. They are presumably bankers' and money exchangers' marks from overseas, indicating that the bank or exchanger in question has examined the note and found it to be genuine. It is the equivalent of the Chinese chop mark on 19th century crown-sized coins such as Trade Dollars.

Because there are so many counterfeit $100 'super notes' in circulation, merchants and foreign money exchangers in Southeast Asia are chopping all they consider authentic. The practice is quite common and it's now unusual for me to find $100 notes without them in Southeast Asia.

I would be skeptical of a clay model because it is so impermanent. Fraser did indeed work in clay but he would have made a plaster cast of his clay model. The plaster is what he brought to Henri Weil in lower Manhattan who made galvanos from the plasters. Weil even silver plated some of these galvanos to give Fraser an idea of what the coin would look like in a silver color (as copper nickel). These galvanos were considered "trials" by numismatist Walter Breen who coined the term "electrotrial."

There are a number of these metal patterns in private hands (via a Joseph Lepczyk auction) that anyone with even a modicum of casting knowledge or working with clay could have made a clay model from one of these metal galvanos. The exhibitors would have to prove the provenance of that clay model back to Fraser to be meaningful.

Here's a neat story of a guy from Texas buying bags of Canadian coins at auction from Houston bus service and turning them into paper money for a tidy profit during a visit up north. While visiting his daughter at college up Northeast, he crossed the border and found a Coinstar machine.

This article in a local newspaper about a "coin" being donated to a tiny town in Michigan is interesting if nothing else for the steps it took to uncover the items' true origin.

There's a great bit of oral history here.