Welcome to Coin Rarities Online as an NBS sponsor. I want to mention their ad in the May 18, 2009, issue of Coin World. They offered a silver spoon made by Ephraim Brasher with the slogan, "Buy the spoon before the doubloon." I found it amusing.

Readers might like to know that I am having an inventory reduction sale. Until the end of June only, everything is 25% off listed prices. Orders must be placed directly with me and not through my web site as prices cannot be reduced there. They should also mention that they saw the notice in the E-Sylum.

Richard Stockley
222 Ste. Anne
Ste. Anne de Bellevue, QC
Canada H9X 1N7


rstockley@videotron.ca
514-366-1704

www.abebooks.com/bookseller/stockleysbooks

History is all around us—even in the spare change jangling in your purse or pocket. For the past decade, the U.S. Mint has offered America a pocketful of history through its popular 50 State Quarters Program. A Pocketful of History tells the story behind each state's quarter: how each state chose its design; what is important about the people, scenes, and themes depicted on the coins; and what the collection tells us about ourselves. It's an entertaining and enriching journey through four hundred years of America—in twenty-five-cent doses. This updated paperback edition will include the U.S. Mint's new quarters honoring Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and four other territories.

I looked at the first state quarter, which was Delaware's, and wondered, "Who the heck is Caesar Rodney?"

The prepublication ordering for the Gobrecht Journal Collective Volume #5 closed June 1st. Orders will continue to be accepted by John McCloskey at the regular price of $60 per copy, however, these orders will not be fulfilled until September as the first printing of 200 copies is sold out. We are very pleased with the response to the prepublication notice. Send orders to:


John McCloskey
President, LSCC
5718 King Arthur Drive
Kettering, OH 45429

"Dye, John S. [with Ebenezer Locke Mason and Edward Maris]. Dye's Coin Encyclopædia: A Complete Illustrated History of the Coins of the World. Philadelphia: Bradley and Company, 1883. 8vo., illustrated boards. 1152, (10) pages, plus 4-page tabulation between pages 6 and 7.

A large compendium of numismatic knowledge with hundreds of illustrations throughout, Dye's work was only half finished when he died. Unknown to most today, the work was completed by Ebenezer Locke Mason and Edward Maris, which certainly increases the volume's importance. Oddly, Dr. Maris doesn't seem to have written the section on the New Jersey coppers, despite the publication of his magnum opus two years before. Dye is more numismatically well-known today for being the publisher of a number of counterfeit detectors. Davis 334."

The piece is probably a kit-bag tag rather than a dog tag, the purpose being to have something to identify the owner by if they were killed in action. They would be tied tight round the top of the bag.

Such pieces are quite common around the WW1 period, and the style of this one is typical. The first approach is usually to write to the regimental headquarters/museum, or equivalent for other services; they are usually very helpful, but do expect to get asked for a donation {£10-£15ish}. I have done it myself once, for a specimen I own; the amount of information they have available is variable, but I was quite lucky.

I don't know how much genealogical knowledge you have to start with, so please forgive me if I have just been telling you what you know already.

The coin was not picked up in Canada, we found it in a pile of old coins my father brought back with him from World War II.

You are right in assuming that I know nothing about Genealogy, but I was able to find out that Isabella Stewart signed up with the WRAF on October the 29th, 1918 at the age of 19. When Isabella signed up she was living at 15 Powis Place in Aberdeen. Next of kin was written down as Mrs. Stewart same address, mother, but no first name on the mother. This would bring her date of birth to around 1899.

It was a good thought that maybe I could reunite the coin with the family but I guess that will never happen. Thanks for the information, I greatly appreciate it.

The name Isabella was, in 1898-99, decidedly more common in Scotland and the very northern counties of England {e.g. Northumberland, Durham} than further south, where it would be quite rare.

Could Isabella have been the girlfriend or fiancée of somebody in your family of about the same age as herself? Put another way, do you know whether your father got it as a random acquisition or because it had meaning to someone who handed it down to him? Your grandfather being perhaps the most obvious candidate, by virtue of his probably being about the right age.

Another possibility: It also occasionally happened that comrades at arms asked each other to take certain of their more valued and sentimental belongings back to their loved ones if they died in action, and Isabella's tag might just have fallen into that category.

Glad to have been of help, but I fear that the chances of finding the family are small. Having said which, you never know quite what a bit of Googling around might produce…

We are now in the planning stage of a large project to digitize items in our Rare Book Room and to make them available for a fee in a digital format to those unable to visit the library itself.

I'd suggest that the best way to start is not to start. Google is doing a good job. Why fight? I can't imagine that a for-fee service like that would ever be cost-effective to an organization like the ANS. Better not to spend any money on the project, not charge anyone for the result, and probably get done a whole lot faster to boot...

We may expand our program to include special collections from libraries both in the U.S. and other countries. If you want to let us know about your library's special collection, please feel free to contact us and include the size of your collection, specialization or unique content, how much of your content is already digital, and what languages it includes. You can also visit this page to learn more about who we're working with, what we're digitizing, and how library books appear in the program.

It would be nice if the ANA also contacted Google about having their library digitized as well.

What's the general feel about the coverage of the ANS and ANA libraries (aside from a platitude that each has some of the same things and some items that the other is lacking)?

Warren C. Cordner, President and sole shareholder of the California Federal Life Insurance Co., purchased some 100,000 Swiss francs as an investment in March 1974. A year later he exchanged the since-appreciated francs for 175 U.S. Double Eagle gold coins at their current market value. In April 1975 the corporation declared a dividend to its sole shareholder, payable in the Double Eagles. The corporation reported to the IRS a distribution of merely $3,500—the face value of the Double Eagles. Moreover, the corporation claimed as a capital loss on the March 1975 exchange the difference between the face value of the Swiss francs and that of the Double Eagles! Talk about chutzpah…

Not surprisingly, the IRS took Cordner to court for underpayment of taxes. Key to Cordner's subterfuge was his insistence that, as long as Double Eagles remain legal tender, then they are “money” for the purposes of calculating gains and losses under the tax code. The judge would have none of this: “regardless of whether technically the Double Eagle gold coins might be legal tender they are not circulating tender, or ‘money,' within the meaning of [the law]…rather, these gold coins are ‘property (other than money)' to be valued at their fair market value”.

Other libertarians, largely in the 1970s, actually attempted to create free nations on the open ocean, sometimes using existing islands and reefs, sometimes using boats or artificial islands. The history of these attempts is equally comic and terrible. The one that most resembles the Seasteading Institute's efforts was Operation Atlantis, in which Werner Stiefel, an upstate New York pharmaceutical manufacturer, convinced a small gang of eager young libertarians to help him build a ferro-cement boat called “Atlantis II” in 1969. This vessel was supposed to sail down to the Caribbean, where the crew might grab some land in disputed territories such as Anguilla or the Silver Shoals near Haiti, or just use the ship as a staging ground to build some artificial concrete land.

The schemers had their own silver coin, dubbed the “deca”; they got some press in Esquire; and they had their own homemade boat. But the ship sank in a hurricane, attention from the Haitian government forced the project into quiet mode (canceling the highly entertaining newsletter Atlantis News), and no new libertarian Atlantis ever arose in the Caribbean.

The king of the “take over existing land” plan was Mike Oliver, a Nevada-based real estate developer and coin dealer who had published a book called A New Constitution for a New Country in 1968.

"Like the London Red Bus, the Kew Gardens pagoda is an instantly recognisable symbol and rather to be cherished for that reason. So I decided not to resist such a strong image but rather to enjoy drawing it. The tower's identity and perpendicular clarity is very useful in a design. I had the idea early on that plants should twine around and grow up through the tower."

His machine accepted a coin and then dispensed a fixed amount of holy water. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.

Polish Numismatic Society finds its roots in the prewar organized numismatic movement. Its predecessors were: Numismatic Society in Krakow (founded in 1888), Warsaw Numismatic Society (founded in 1915, but with roots dating back to 1845), Numismatic Society in Poznań (founded in 1920), Lwów Numismatic Association (founded in 1925) and Numismatic Society of Bydgoszcz (founded in 1935)

During the prewar years Polish numismatists were associated in turns in: Polish Archeological Society, then in Polish Archeological and Numismatic Society and since 1991 in the present organization.