Ever since coming to work in numismatics, our editors have been saying we need to do something with "The Haxby" work that we put out twenty years ago. Nobody can find it, except for eBay and Amazon where the books are going for more than $700. So we digitized the books and put them on four CDs to try and replicate the original work.

Hopefully this will allow people who have wanted to use this reference the chance to do it for a more affordable price. We’re really excited about this, and hope it goes over well with collectors!

Numismatists should be warned that it's a non-traditional numismatic book - there's nary a word about mintages, proof or uncirculated strikes, silver planchets, mint errors, etc., and David Ganz' role in promoting the concept is given only a passing mention.

Mr. Kilenyi regrets that there is no adequate English word to describe his calling. In French there is "medailleur," but in English "medallist" is generally taken to mean a winner of medals, which he thinks peculiar.

The story still being rehashed by many writers today was published in, I believe, 1929. I'm not at my office where I have my article scrapbooks, but I remember Bob Julian outing some Lithuanian-American's account published in The Numismatist that year in which the author turned Brenner into some kind of Lithuanian-American folk hero. In a pre-internet era I simply repeated this material myself, something I will never do again.

In American Numismatic Before the Civil War, Bowers has a chapter on the Foskett collection. Total personal information on Foskett comes down to this, "In his time, Foskett was well known in New York City. In the oyster business at 104 Third Avenue, he lived at 116 Stanton Street,"

A James D. Foskett apears in the 1850 U.S. Census in New York City. He was born around 1830 in Massachusetts. He would be young to sell a coin collection in 1859, but still ten years older than cataloguer Augustus B. Sage.

The 1870 U. S. Census has the same James D. Foskett living in Suffolk. Massachusetts. The name James Foskett, without a middle initial, is common enough to be difficult to research.

A more complete coverage of the "telegraph" systems before the electrical telegraph is in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (ISBN 0-425-17169-8). Per the suggestion of a friend, I borrowed and read it.

Rather than the telegraph arms having 9,999 possible positions to define the individual words, most of the many different systems transmitted digits via arm positions, flags, etc. and then a multidigit number defined a word in a codebook. Although as the E-Sylum article said, the systems were fast compared to previous communication, the staffing requirements made them expensive and they were almost exclusively for government use.

Thank you for finding a way to include an illustration of Pistrucci's Waterloo Medal. However, it does not fit the facts of the story. Pistrucci's medal is described in British Historical Medals 1760-1960 by Lawrence Brown. The medal was not available until 1849 so it would not have been given to soldiers "after the battle." Providing one to "all ranks" would have required tens of thousands of medals. On pages 210-211 of the Brown book is a reproduction of the prospectus for the Pistrucci medal. It was offered in copper to anyone with two Pounds, two Shillings to spend. No mention is made of giving any to the soldiers. There are dozens of medal related to Waterloo. One may have been a campaign medal. but it was not the Pistrucci Medal.

I was surprised when I read this morning's issue of the E-Sylum to the point of nearly falling out of my chair. You know how there is a tiny bit of information that for some strange reason remains firmly lodged in your brain which refuses to be dislodged by other bits of "useless" information. While, such is the case with the Waterloo medal which you so aptly describe in this morning's issue. Without a doubt this is Pistrucci's handsomest production

However, I could not understand where this medal came from nor how the family could claim that their ancestor had been awarded the medal. Pistrucci worked on the illustrated "Waterloo medal" for over three decades and it is unquestionably the legacy of his lifetime's work with the Royal Mint.

It is my understanding, however, that the dies that Pistrucci finally produced were deemed to be too large to strike from without risk of damaging them. Electrotypes were prepared of the Waterloo medal but this was sometime in the 1850s. I do not know whether any proof or specimen pieces were struck from the dies but there were definitely no pieces struck for presentation.

Sadly what has happened here is a mixup in photographs. There is a military decoration known as the "Waterloo medal" which was issued with a suspension loop and ribbon. The medals were presented to all ranks who had served at the battles of Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo from June 16th - 18th, 1815. Clearly it is an example of this decoration which the family are putting up for auction and not one of Pistrucci's pieces.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but this is simply an editorial mixup. I wouldn't let this bother you too much. It made for interesting reading and prompted me to go and relearn a bit more about both Waterloo medals again.

Keep up the great work. I look forward to reading The E-Sylum every Monday morning.

This conclusion does not follow from the denominational values shown on the edges of the first half dollar and dollar coins, or on the pattern half dismes and dismes, which I had overlooked. Instead, it appears that whether or not a denominational value was to be placed on our first coins was an arbitrary decision of the chief coiner and/or engraver. Of course, the smaller the coin, the less room for a denominational value on either side or on the edge.

I did check the Mint Act of April 2, 1792. It calls for placement of a denominational value only on the copper coins (sec. 10), but does call for certain devices and legends on all coins (ibid.) Other than that, it was up to the chief coiner to cause coins to be minted "according to such regulations as shall be prescribed by this or any future law," and up to the engraver to prepare dies "with the proper devices and inscriptions" (sec. 3).

Designs incorporating denominational values (and all required devices and legends) could have been prepared for all silver and gold coins, but they were not, with the exceptions noted above. Later acts did require denominational values to be placed on all coins, together with additional inscriptions (e.g. "In God we trust").

We are a non-for-profit community group in Australia, the Australian Institute for Community Currencies Inc and are preparing to launch Australia's first paper dollar-backed local currency in the Sunshine Coast hinterland region. Named the Baroon Dollar, we will be producing collectors edition sets, with the possibility of a commemorative token in August/September 2009. Within the next month collectors of complementary currencies and tokens will be able to pre-order at our website www.baroondollar.org

A great selection of prominent local artists have offered to supply artwork to be the face of the Baroon Dollar - the hinterland's new comunity currency. Steve Demmasson of Sahitya Graphics based in Maleny is currently working on designing the 1,2,5,10 and 20 Baroon Dollar notes ready for a launch in August.

The old dairy farming town of Maleny in Queensland's Sunshine Coast hinterland, perched lushly on the Blackall Ranges, now attracts tree changers, hippies, artists and weekend tourists.

In 2004 Maleny locals made headlines for trying to stop the construction of a Woolworths on the banks of the town's Obi Obi Creek, which was a platypus habitat.

After long stand-offs, they lost that battle and the supermarket was built.

But this time they have taken on a bigger opponent and have decided to hit back at the global financial crisis.

They are going to print their own money.

The Baroon Dollar - named after Lake Baroon near Maleny - will be printed and sold at local, independent businesses to encourage locals and visitors to keep buying up locally.

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 1933 5 (bronze) and 20 (silver) Skaloj pieces were possibly dispensed that same year at the Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Both coins, are dedicated to Christiano I, Prince Regent. I've also seen images of a set of six Skaloj/Dalo stamps from 1935 featuring Queen Marie.

It is tentatively speculated that the term employed for the coins' denomination may have a linguistic connection to Esperanto: whereby a "skalo" (adding the "j" renders it plural) is a scale of measurement — a system of ordered marks at fixed intervals; a calibrated line; a progressive classification, as of size, amount, importance, or rank (e.g. a wage scale, a musical scale, the scale on a map).

KINGDOM OF ATLANTIS: This coin is the valiant creation of Mr. Edward J. Moschetti (worldproofna@aol.com), the founder/President of the World Proof Numismatic Association (PO Box 4094, Pittsburgh, PA, 15201-0094). They have been a purveyor of these desirable types of coins since 1964, and they carry a fantastic stock of proof coinage. Please write to them and they will mail you any information you request.

I commend and applaud Mr. Moschetti's decisively bold transition into the designing and minting of his own patterns. I purchased the copper MMIV 20 Atlantis Dollars, but there are also a silver and gold 100 Atlantis Dollars. The obverse "features a small girl perhaps one of Poseidon’s children in the foreground with lake and mountains in background." The reverse "features Poseidon, the God of Atlantis along with his mortal wife Cleito standing in front of the Golden Gates of Atlantis."

Mr. Moschetti would go on to issue additional versions of the popular 20/100 Atlantis Dollars (the obverse being the only side that is markedly different): the 2007 edition features "two Atlantis boatsmen in their outrigger", and the 2009 edition features an "Atlantis woman bathing in a lake, with a waterfall in front of her. A Temple appears on the upper left part of the background."

Images of Atlantis' coinage can be viewed at the Coin Library of the USNS: http://www.usns.info/coin-atlantiskingdom.html They can also be seen at the Web-site of Mr. Jorge Fernández Vidal: http://www.jfvcoins.com/Productos/micronations_english=catAC.html

The aim of the Roman Provincial Coinage series is to produce a standard typology of the provincial coinage of the Roman Empire from its beginning in 44 BC to its end in AD 296/7. The current Roman Provincial Coinage Online project is confined to the Antonine period (AD 138–192), but it is intended that it will form a model for putting other periods online in the future.

The database is based on the ten most important and accessible collections in the world, and on all published material. It comprises one of the largest collections of images and related inscriptions from the ancient world which is searchable by iconography, place, and time.

The database contains information on 13,729 coin types, based on 46,725 specimens (9,061 of which have images).