ANS ORIENTAL NUMISMATIC BOOK FUND DONATIONS SOUGHT

Help Fill in the Gaps in the Oriental Numismatics Collection of the Harry W. Bass Jr. Library

The American Numismatic Society not only houses one of the largest collections of Oriental coins in the world, it also publishes books on Oriental numismatics, including a soon-forthcoming major study of Kashan coinage and a study of the banknotes of the Imperial Bank of Persia. Naturally, the Society’s Harry W. Bass Jr. Library would like to keep pace. But it is difficult for the staff to identify what has been published in Oriental numismatics without input from specialists in Islamic, South Asia, Southeast Asian and East Asian numismatics.

That is where Prof. Jere L. Bacharach comes in. Prof. Bacharach, an ANS Trustee as well as a member of the Oriental Numismatic Society, has been diligently checking each issue of the Journal of the Oriental Numismatics Society (JONS) and then consulting with the Bass Library staff to help identify what items the library is missing. The effort is rewarding: a review of the past four issues of JONS, for example, revealed that there are 13 recently published works the library does not own.

Still, identifying such missing items is not quite enough. There remains the critical issue of securing the funds to acquire them.

And that is the point at which Dr. Ute Wartenberg Kagan, Executive Director of the ANS, enters the picture. Dr. Wartenberg Kagan has found an anonymous donor who will contribute up to $1,000 in matching funds, in blocks of $50, to buy books listed in JONS that the ANS does not have. That is, for each U.S. tax-deductible gift of $50 to the ANS “Oriental Numismatic Book Fund,” that donor will contribute another $50 to buy books exclusively in this field. These resulting $100 blocks will ensure that the Harry W. Bass Jr. Library can purchase books on Oriental numismatics in a timely fashion, while they are still available in the market, from a fund dedicated to their acquisition.

Dr. Wartenberg Kagan is thrilled with this initiative, and she hopes it will encourage enthusiasts in other numismatic specialties to consider launching their own dedicated funds.

Those dedicated to Oriental numismatics, though, now have no need to wait. If you would like to support scholarship in the field, please send a check made out to “American Numismatic Society– Oriental Numismatic Book Fund,” and mail it to the American Numismatic Society, 75 Varick Street, Floor 11, New York, N.Y. 10013 USA, or donate online at the ANS web site. Be sure to note that your gift is for the "Oriental Numismatic Book Fund."

To visit the ANS web site, see:
www.numismatics.org

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web