THE DICK JOHNSON TOOLBOX

I just attended the Fall PAN Show in Monroeville, PA. There were a number medals and plaques on the show bourse. One vendor had a very nice selection of med- als with one case devoted solely to the medals by Laura Gardin Fraser, James Earle Fraser and John Flanagan. I kept returning to the booth because one of the medals nestled among the Laura Gardin Fraser medals was the Robert Wallace medal celebrating the centennial of the silverware manufacturer. The medal bore an LG colophon in the right obverse field. The vendor felt this stood for Laura Gardin Fraser.

I wasn’t so sure. When I returned home after the show I checked Monograms of American Coin and Medal Artists by D. Wayne Johnson. He records 11 different monograms and colophons for Laura Gardin Fraser. None of them match the colophon above. He does not record any use of just her maiden name initials. The Wallace medal was struck in 1935 and Laura Garden had been signing her work with all her initials since her marriage to James Earle Fraser in Nov. 1913. The pieces she did prior to her marriage; the Cardinal Farley medallion in 1912 is signed L. Gardin and the Better Babies and the Nat’l Institute of Social Sciences medals in 1913 are both signed Laura Gar- din. So instead of L. G., I paged further through the mono- grams book to look for artists with the initials G. L. And there he was: Georg John Lober (1892-1961). The above colophon was identified exactly in Figure 9 and so was the medal: the 1935 Wallace Silversmiths’ Centennial struck by The Robbins Company. To be fair I had heard the name Georg Lober before. In my discussions with the PAN vendor he did mention Lober as a possible alternative.

With the name in hand, I looked him up in Johnson’s Who’s Who Among American Medallists and found a short bio listing his exhibition credits and fellowship in the National Sculpture Society. I then went to the Who’s Who companion website, www.medalartists.com, and checked out Georg Lober in the artists’ databank created by Dick Johnson. The Lober entry ran to 7 pages and listed about 25 medals, most of them illustrated. The Wallace medal was not illustrated but it did note that the medal was not only struck by The Robbins Company but it was also struck by Medallic Art Co. MACo 1935-070. It would be interesting to learn why two different companies struck the same medal.

The legend at the top of the medal is striking and I wondered how it should be properly described. It looks like the rim of the medal was excavated leaving a shallow trough with the residue forming the letters of the name ROBERT WALLACE. The flat top surfaces of the letters match exactly the height of the raised rim. I looked up various words and expressions in An Encyclopedia of Coin and Medal Technology compiled by Dick Johnson and found that a precise description of the legend is ‘incise lettering at the top of a wide raised rim.’

Moving beyond the Johnson Toolbox to the wider inter- net, http://medallicartcollector.com/georg-lober_medals.html has a lovely entry for the Wallace medal, a 27⁄8-inch bronze example edge marked ROBBINS CO / ATTLEBORO with a brief history of the company and its founder. One other interesting piece came to light; a 14 inch square plaque with a 12 inch version of the obverse of the medal centered on a metal plate. Could this be a galvano of the original model? I believe Paul Bosco currently has this plaque in inventory.

It took longer to write up this piece than it did to do the research. The Dick Johnson Toolbox should be at the elbow of every numismatic researcher for quick and ready reference.

Paul Bosco confirms:

President’s Message

Introduction by the Editor

Letters to the Editor

Treats and a Treaty – Fidem 2016
by Marcy Leavitt Bourne

The Medallic Researcher's First Stop
by Harry Waterson

First Post-War New Orleans Mint Production
by Roger W. Burdette

A Discussion of Pre-formed Planchets

A Double "A" or a Composite "M"
by Lev Tsitrin

Splashers, Shells and Clichés
An excerpt from Medallic Washington
by Neil Musante

Medals Formed En Cliché
an 1844 article reprinted from The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

MCA Advisory Editor John W. Adams adds:

For more information about Medal Collectors of America, see:
www.medalcollectors.org

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