NEWMAN PORTAL SCANS MEHL’S NUMISMATIC MONTHLY

B. Max Mehl, one of the more colorful coin dealers in American history, published his   Numismatic Monthly house organ from 1908-1919. The Monthly reads quite similar to   The Numismatist for the same period, featuring numismatic society updates, letters to the editor, advertisements for coins and books, and tidbits extracted from local newspapers.

The March 1910 issue, for example, reprints a diatribe from the Washington Post. Irritated that the Mint continued to strike military medals from original dies, the article asks “What’s the use of having had an ancestor who scrapped alongside John Paul Jones and got a bronze medal for his work, if every gazebo with a dollar and a half in his clothes can now slip in and get the identical piece of bronze with the official guarantee of its genuineness from the United States Treasury Department?” (Reflective of most contemporary collectors, the writer was unfamiliar with distinguishing die characteristics of such pieces.)

Feature articles are interspersed, with the April 1910 issue presenting an overview of Vermont coinage and a note on the 1861-O Confederate half dollar. Mehl, who advertised widely in the mass media, was attracted to cartooning and occasionally used this creative form. This influence is seen in the October 1919 issue, where Mehl reprinted a cartoon, “The Present Droll Situation in Foreign Exchange,” from the New York Mail. [image attached] The Newman Portal acknowledges Joel Orosz for loaning his set of the Monthly for scanning.

To read Mehl’s Numismatic Monthly on Internet Archive, see:
Mehl’s Numismatic Monthly (https://archive.org/details/newmannumismatic?and%5b%5d=mehl%20monthly)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web