I thoroughly agree with P.K. Saha. Gerhard Schõn's WMK is far superior now to the KM cat, more complete and more detailed. Of course, if you read German that makes it even better!

Good issue, as always. We sold a Porter Counterfeit detector in Sale 120 (the 2011 NY Book Auction), lot 480. It brought $805 with the premium, right in the range Stack's-Bowers gives as an estimate. It was a pretty neat-looking device, but really difficult to manipulate and hard to imagine using with any success.

The schedule of classes for 2013 has been added to the Rare Book School's web site. RBS has been around for almost 30 years. They offer courses in a format somewhat similar to the ANA's Summer Seminar. While collectors are not uncommon, many of the students are librarians, rare book dealers, and other professionals.

We were closed all last week due to power outages (and our email servers were also down, which is why there were probably no emails from ANS staff being answered!) All is well here at the ANS, although various staff members are still dealing with power and heat issues at their homes. The ANS building is in the lower part of Manhattan and relatively near the water edge, but I don't think we had any flooding and just had power out for the entire week. I am back in today and was happy to see that the library is in fine shape.

Personally I was fine as well as I live in a part of Queens that never lost power and did not see much flooding (nor am I near where that horrible fire took place). The biggest challenge came from trying to get back into the city (which I didn't bother trying to do until today since the ANS was closed). There were quite a few rather large trees down around me as well, and I am amazed that wind alone could pull them up by their roots (in many cases, parts of the sidewalk were broken as the tree came uprooted).

It was quite a week and parts of lower Manhattan are indeed still flooded. I don't know details about the Fed, but I haven't heard anything negative yet and their website says they are open, so I imagine they were dealing with power issues like the rest of us.

There is an error in the name of the town which issued the piece. Correct spelling is Nördlingen. Or, if one has a problem with foreign letters: Noerdlingen. Formerly a Free City, today it is in the state of Bavaria and has a population of something over 20,000.

Might it be that the gentlemen are trying to make this item something which it is not? It looks to me as if it might be just a rather unkempt dog. Could be a (non official) dog tag. Also seems to me I remember reading something somewhere sometime about there once having been a tax in Connecticut for guys who habitually told Shaggy Dog Stories. Maybe this is a tax tag for such a person.