"I had the pleasure of going to the Garretts' beautiful residence in Baltimore, the Evergreen house (pictured on covers of B&R Garrett I-IV). Housed therein are the Garretts' correspondence with all the dealers and organizations of the time. I had the privilege of examining these, which are all housed in file folders in the basement of the house. The letters are simply fascinating. One can truly learn much about the numismatic scene from the 1870s through 1940s from those letters. Among the personalities represented in the correspondence files were the Chapman brothers, W. Elliot Woodward, Wayte Raymond, B. Max Mehl, David Proskey, Burdette G. Johnson, Thomas Elder, J. Colvin Randall, Harold P. Newlin and even Anthony C. Paquet.

Although Bowers copied some key letters into The History of U.S. Coinage as Illustrated by the Garrett Collection, some terrific letters were omitted. The book is no replacement for viewing the files in person, which brings me to my next point. Since only half a dozen people (per the museum's estimate) have viewed the letters in the last 20 years, should they be sold? In their current space, they are kept in a dark dungeon-like room in old rusty file cabinets. In my opinion, they should either be transcribed into a book or sold. The numismatic community should have access to items such as these, as no comparable series of numismatic letters and telegrams exists."

"A half dozen scholars viewing material over a 20 year period doesn't sound like such light usage that an archive would want to discard the letters. Remember that when Walter Breen started his work for Wayte Raymond in the National Archives in the 1950s, he worked with documents that hadn't been looked at by ANYONE in 150 years."