If you go into any Morton’s (it is part of the Landry’s chain) along one wall they have wire-fronted cases with bottles of wine, etc., say a half dozen or so, and a metal plaque below with a patron’s name. If you lived in Baltimore and were into such things, when you dined at Morton’s you could ask the waiter to bring you a selection from your cabinet. A few years ago me and numismatic friends were at a Morton’s near Chicago. There on a prominent bin with contents was the label TIGER WOODS.

“Does Tiger Woods eat here?” I asked.

The manager replied, “No, but if he ever comes we have his favorite wines.”

I sat between Joel Orosz and Wayne Homren. Joel and I had a delightful discussion on a number of topics, including the paradoxes of Thomas Jefferson, the research and writing of his new book, 1792: Birth of a Nation’s Coinage, and his earlier work on Frank Stewart and the U.S. Mint. Wayne talked about his early numismatic book collecting days in Pittsburgh. Mary Burleson and Tom Kays added to the conversation on a range of issues, and the nearly four-hour dinner seemed to embody an anthology of historical and contemporary stories.

"I sat next to Wayne Herndon and had a fascinating discussion about the coin and currency supply business. Wayne delivers a staggering 20 tons (not a typo) of books, holders, supplies, you name it, to major shows. His business, Wizard Coin Supply, owns its own semi and Wayne is an expert on truck operator licensing and regulations in virtually all 50 states. He is equally adept at identifying the best carrier (UPS, USPS, FexEd) for his entire product line, depending on the item sold and where it’s going. It’s almost more about logistics than coin supplies, but of course all we see on the customer side is the actual product, and one never thinks about all the backend support required to make that book you want appear on the coin show floor.

"My introduction to Wayne was buying a coin scale some years ago, and Wayne personally handled the email all the way from order placement through delivery confirmation. I’m sure he has scaled way up since then, but I always appreciated the personal service for even a nominal purchase."

The second annual, Nummis Nova Dinner at the Whitman - Baltimore Spring Expo began with Joe Esposito handing out limited edition, collector buttons of the dinner, and Eric Schena handing out name tags with Lord Baltimore’s silver as the logo, in deference to our dining location. Morton’s Steak House is attached to the Sheraton Hotel at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, and I arrived early, watching for folks to show up.

I delivered to Eric Shena his Montgomery Blair (Lincoln’s Post Master General), Russian coin envelopes as discussed in the last two E-Sylums. Seated between Julian and Mary, I could be a pest and talk down the table toward the Garretts and Dave Bowers, or over toward Joe, Wayne and Neil Musante. Ben Garrett is a coin dealer from Sarasota, Florida, and we talked about local eateries the tourists don’t know about down Sarasota way. Ben once worked for a Third-Party Grading (TPG) service as a grader. I am still amazed that anyone can really tell the difference between MS-69 and MS-70 grades, but Ben can, and does well doing so.

Talk wended around to the idea that Third Party Grading services need “the next big thing” to help them keep coins coming in for their considered opinion. After the “Green Bean” and other such schemes, we don’t really know what the population of certain rare coins are, because dealers would break out and resubmit the same coin nine or ten times in a row, hoping for one numerical grade higher, each time the grading service sees it. TPGs might be erroneously tracking nine of the identical grade coins, yet one fateful Monday morning before having wake-up coffee, a grader would see the identical coin again, in a different light, and rate it up point. So, one coin that statistically should be the lower grade nine times out of ten, stops returning once a higher grade is given.

Dave recently wrote about the Sheldon Grading scale and he told us it was based on prices of large cents back about seventy-five years ago. A grade of VF-20 might trade at $20 and an EF-40 would trade at double the price of the VF-20. If VF-20s rise to $30 in the market place the EF-40 would go for $60. The scale topped out at the lofty price of 70 times what a perfect coin should bring, over the basal state. We know prices today don’t cooperate in a linear fashion, since Sheldon set us the seventy-point scale. Rare, near perfect coins may be exponentially more than basal state slugs. What makes sense would be a new “Metric Grading System” with a non-linear basis for rarity. We talked about a new, one hundred- point scale, so that every slabbed coin would need to be sent back for the decimal rating conversion, under convenient payment plans. We talked about that with smiles, thinking, no, that shouldn’t happen. But just in case TPGs need this collector complication to stay in business, I wanted to note that it started here, with us, at the Nummis Nova dinner in 2017. Let’s call the new, one hundred point, metric grading system, the “Nummis Nova Metric Coin Grading System TM .” Stay tuned to the E-Sylum to find out if this innovation may transform the coin business into greater profitability, or land on the scrap heap of less-than- ideal business strategies. I had to admit to Mary that I have been collecting coins for over fifty years and don’t own any entombed coins myself, having been happy with the 1970s, ANA Grading Standards and Photo-Grade, from back in the day.

Bunches of other stuff went by in discussion including Joe’s progress on documenting a particular meeting of VIPs, under the Kennedy Administration, Coin-Op devices (Dave Bowers other collecting love), which may soon appear in Whitman Publishing’s new edition of the “Mega-Red Book,” sports of the Crimson Tide, the fire under the I-85, private islands, book writing and e-publishing per Neil Musante, and what he would do different, if he had it to do all over again, touring Mount Vernon, coin design changes under French King Louis XIV (with examples present for show-and- tell), milestones in numismatic book digitization, and how nice it was to see everyone and share talk, stories and side dishes that accompanied a delightful meal. Some of us had to go to work the next day, and others got to attend the big show. The evening ended all too soon for me. 'Till next year, may we all meet again.