BOOK REVIEW: INGLE SYSTEM SCRIP

One of the most-used items in my library of trade token references is “A Checklist and Aid to Attributing Ingle System Scrip” by the late Lloyd E. Wagaman. Published in 1987 by the Indiana-Kentucky-Ohio Token and Medal Society (IKO-TAMS), this was the fruit of thousands of hours of poring over the credit ratings books of the Bradstreet and R. G. Dun companies, city directories, and other references at Wagaman’s disposal.

He had compiled a list of thousands of tokens made by the Ingle Brothers of Dayton, Ohio between 1908 and 1919, most of which were “mavericks”, carrying only the business name and not the town and state where the business operated. As Wagaman indicated, his work was only a start - his method of attribution was only reliable in the case of unusual names. In the case of “Smith Bros.”, for instance, he took his best guess among the thousand businesses with those proprietors to attribute the one Smith Bros. Ingle token he was aware of.

In the thirty years following this initial work, many new pieces of information have come to light. Foremost among them are the discovery of a ledger which the Ingle company used to keep track of their shipments. This ledger is incomplete, but it enabled the correlation of business names with locations in many cases. Next came the expansion of the Internet, giving access to many historical references relating to businesses that used Ingle tokens. And then, just a bit over ten years ago, Richard Greever opened the tokencatalog.com website where thousands of contributors around the world have listed close to half a million individual tokens, many with historical information accompanying them.

Many maverick researchers interested in the Ingle series, John Byars chief among them, have corroborated or corrected listings from the Wagaman list. Now, in a format similar to the original, Richard Greever and John Byars have published this new work, a project of TokenCatalog.com, that is a most welcome replacement for the original Wagaman work.

For more information, or to order, see: http://www.tokencatalog.com/ads/IngleChecklist/IngleChecklistAd.pdf

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