The E-Sylum:  Volume 8, Number 22, May 29, 2005, Article 7

VATTAMARE APPRECIATION

Robert J. Galiette of Essex, Connecticut writes: "I regularly
appreciate your weekly efforts to alert us to new publications
and articles, and Fred Lake's advice to me a number of years
ago to get on the mailing list for the E-Sylum. For example,
without your helpful alert in the 5/15/05 E-Sylum about the
article in the June 2005 issue of Coinage magazine, I'm certain
that I'd have missed the informative article about Alexandre
Vattemare.

Without Vattemare's specimen documents from the 1840's,
the cataloging and research that Gene Hessler did over twenty
years ago for the original Robson Lowe /Christie's auction of
them and his subsequent publication of An Illustrated History
of U.S. Loans, and the examples of early U.S. bonds and notes
that traced their origins to the Vattemare collection when Stack's
auctioned Part VI of John J. Ford, Jr.'s collection last October,
there'd be no illustrations or information concerning important
early decades related to the financing of U.S. debt. Even the
Federal Government has no examples from the post-Jacksonian
period of the 1840's of a number of the early U.S. bonds that
represent the roots of today's National Debt. Many of
Vattemare's specimens are unique survivors.

Documents from the original Vattemare collection were sold
by Robson Lowe / Christie's on April 1, 1982 (Part I) and on
September 17, 1982 (Part II) as smaller segments to the firm's
stamp auctions on these dates. Both sales therefore were
outside the mainstream of numismatic and currency auctions,
and this literature accordingly is difficult to locate. Even the
ANA Library recently reported having only one of these two
catalogs. Does anyone know of a source for them? I'd
appreciate any related advice."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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