I was saddened to learn of Mark's passing. Attached is a photo I took of him in his office next to one of the many coin cabinets. He was a gracious host and was very helpful in the preparation of my WorldWide Coins article on the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. I was planning to make return visits to both the Ashmolean (Oxford) and Fitzwilliam Museums sometime next year. Somehow, it won't be the same without him there.

I thoroughly checked the web and cannot find Imago Lattara listed nor a copy of this new work within ADDALL BOOKS-NEW nor BOOKFINDER. Perhaps you can have Frank Holt provide an order address? Even nicer if we can order directly from the authors.

I'm glad to see George Selgin's book come out in paperback; it is a revealing and fun read. I purchased mine from Jon Lusk at the 2009 Token Congress held in Seattle, Washington. I immediately started to look through it and was looking forward to reading it when I returned home. I went to the table I shared with Jerry Bobbe for the bourse section of the conference and started to tell all I met about the book and that every British token collector should have a copy.

One fellow walked up and was looking at our tokens and of course I went into my enthusiastic spiel about the book and why I felt it was so essential to the historian and collector alike. It was then that I was introduced to George Selgin. We both had a great chuckle together. My copy is autographed. What fun!

I very quickly found references for German East Africa in both Krause SCWC and online at www.numismaster.com.

I'm currently deployed overseas and I really miss collecting. I really want to assemble a set of German East African coins but I can't find any published reference information (if I can't collect, at least I can do the research). My ultimate goal is to assemble as complete a set as possible of both the coinage and notes.

As always, a very interesting Sunday night read. Regarding the Victoria Cross story, I thought the Aussies gave up the pound 45 years ago and switched over to the dollar.

The Sun, which reported the sale of the Victoria Cross, is evidently a British paper, so the 770,000 pounds was the British currency equivalent of the sale price. Australia has not used a pound in decades. The sale was actually of a group of ten medals, with the VC at the head of the bar. Noble Numismatics in Melbourne sold them 26-28 July for AUD 1,167,330 (with juice), or USD 1.193 million this evening.

They really need to give you a bigger research budget so you can get out of the U.S. more often: As I'm sure others have mentioned, there's been no such thing as an Australian Pound since 1966. The newspaper article you reference was from the UK, and they had converted the sales price into UK pounds for the benefit of their readers. The price in Australian Dollars was $1,002,000 for the lot that included the VC, according to the Australian press coverage.

On July 28, the date of the sale, that was USD 1,104,580 at the interbank rate.

(And why The Sun, in the UK, published such an vague story that long after the sale....oh, who knows.)