I just heard from my printer that the National Coin Album books will be in my hands on or around October 14. I'm disappointed that I won't have them for the Philadelphia and Long Beach shows, but I will have my own printout of the book at the NGC booth for both shows, and I'll be taking pre-orders at the discounted price of $65.

Around the early 1960's, while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard in the Pacific area, I had the opportunity to visit the Island of Yap on various occasions. I became friendly with the natives and asked them about their stone money system and their rationale behind it. They told me; "The Germans came with their marks and left, The British came with their pounds and left, The Spaniards came with their reales and left, The Japanese brought their yens and are gone. Now the Americans have brought the dollars, and we don't know how long they are going to be here. But all the time, our stone money is still here."

The main principle of the stone money is similar to the Gold Standard. As long as we have lots of it buried in Fort Knox, our paper money has value. This is why the U.S. exchanged the Puerto Rico peso at .60 cents to the dollar when we took over that island as a result of the Spanish/American war in 1898, notwithstanding the fact that the P.R. peso had slightly more silver than the U.S. silver dollar.

Nevertheless, the Puerto Rican peso in today's market is worth from $300.00 to $10,000.00, depending on the condition. What goes out, comes back!

I have an identical Wedgwood portrait of the Vicomte de Noailles in my collection, acquired at a London auction sale six years ago.

Both the Baldwin's example and mine are correctly described as creamware factory reference models, as they were hung up and used as guides for Wedgwood's factory workers (hence the piercing, which occurs on all of the factory reference models I have seen).

These reference models (although not the Noailles), frequently feature a sometimes amusing phonetic rendering of the subject's name inscribed on the back. For example, the Warren Hastings Wedgwood reference model in my collection is identified as A.Stain .

Eborac is an abbreviation -- as noted with the "." following EBORAC. No Latin word would end in "c".