COLONIAL NEWSLETTER CELEBRATES 50TH ANNIVERSARY

The year 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Colonial Newsletter, the journal of record for all serious students of colonial coinage and the history of its production, circulation, counterfeiting, and collecting. Since 1960, its amazingly talented and dedicated editors, Al Hoch, Jim Spilman, Phil Mossman, and Gary Trudgen have been responsible for bringing some of the most important studies of coinage of the colonial period before the eyes of the CNL readership and thereby transforming the way that the money of early America is understood and collected today. We owe them an enormous gratitude for their work on behalf of the entire colonial numismatic community.

I am very pleased to announce that beginning with the August 2010 issue, Oliver Hoover will become the fifth editor-in-chief of the Colonial Newsletter and will guide the venerable publication into its next fifty years serving the colonial community. If you are a current member of the American Numismatic Society (and possibly even if you are not) you may already be familiar with Oliver's broad interest and knowledge of the colonial field from his various articles and reviews in the ANS Magazine, the American Journal of Numismatics, the most recent Proceedings of the Coinage of the Americas Conference, and his moderation of a popular colonial numismatic e-group. He now brings his expertise and infectious enthusiasm for the study of colonial coins to the Colonial Newsletter.

In order to celebrate the last five decades of scholarship and to start the next half-century with a bang, Oliver and the dedicated CNL editorial team of Lou Jordan, Phil Mossman, John Kleeberg, and John Kraljevich have a number of exiting items to fill out the remaining two issues of 2010 (August and December). These include a sneak-preview of selected pre-publication chapters of Phil Mossman's new book on counterfeits and counterfeiting in the colonial period, as well as the beginning of a serialized plate publication of the American Numismatic Society's extensive colonial coin holdings (beginning with state coppers).

When this project is completed, years from now, CNL readers will have an unparalleled resource in the sequential pages of the Newsletter. In addition to these major treats, the next issues of the CNL will also include a history of the Newsletter, a discussion of NE silver, an annotated version of Samuel Thompson's Essay on Coining (1783), and a critical response to John Lupia's very interesting chronology for the St. Patrick coppers presented in the Winter 2009 issue of the C4 Newsletter.

Of course, the only way to get in on all of this excitement is to become a subscriber to the Colonial Newsletter. A one- year subscription (3 issues) costs $50.00 (much less than the cost of most colonial coins and related publications) for non-members of the American Numismatic Society. The subscription fee is reduced to $35.00 for current ANS members. Subscriptions can be ordered online by credit card through the American Numismatic Society's webpage at http://www.numismatics.org/CNL/CNL or by contacting the ANS Membership Associate, Megan Fenselau, by email (membership@numismatics.org) or phone (212-5571-4470 ext. 117).

A CD of Colonial Newsletter back issues in PDF format from serial number 104 to present (142 as of April 2010) is also available for $50.00 on the same site or by contacting Megan. Information on ANS membership, which includes the reduced rate for CNL as well as a subscription to the ANS Magazine, which regularly includes features on colonial numismatic topics, can be found at http://www.numismatics.org/Membership/Membership.

Subscribe to the CNL now in order to get in on the scholarship of the past and the excitement in the future. Otherwise you will be kicking yourself later when you are scrambling for those hard-to-find and must-have back issues in order to complete your fundamental Colonial Numismatic library.

The Colonial Newsletter has been and will continue to be the place to be for cutting-edge colonial numismatics, whether you are interested in the coinages circulating in the British, French, and Spanish colonies in America, American colonial coins produced before confederation, state coppers and related U.S. confederation issues, American colonial and revolutionary paper money, counterfeits, or tokens.

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