Thanks for including the information on the new book on the Sentimental Magazine medals. I collect them and was very excited to learn of this publication. I’ve ordered the book.

Living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, I have seen so many different things written or stamped on Federal Reserve Notes that I am now thinking I should keep them and write a book or at least take pictures of them first. I have seen messages for nearly every political situation dating back over 20 years. Now that I am no longer working as a contractor to the federal government, I am not traveling into the District as much.

Lately, I have seen both pro- and anti-administration messages written or stamped on currency the further from D.C. I go. On a recent trip to Fredericksburg, VA I was given a Series 2009 $1 Geithner-Rios note in change with an anti-administration message written on the back.

Following the last Whitman Expo I stopped near the convention center for bottle of water and the $5 note I received in change had a message favorable to Gov. Larry Hogan. I thought this was strange since Baltimore is overwhelmingly Democratic and the governor is a Republican.

During the last election I found a few pro-Green Party stickered quarters.

And this doesn't count the "Where's George" stamped currency I have received over the years.

I just wanted to respond to Dave Bowers' assertion that “Specialization is the key to longevity” in coin collecting. It is obvious that officers in specialized publications will be specialists in those respective fields, but this does not mean that generalists stop collecting after a few years. They simply are not so dedicated to a single area of numismatics that they become an officer in a specialized club.

From my own experience, I collected circulating US issues in the 1960s, but I discovered that when I had completed something like Roosevelt dimes or Liberty Walking Halves, I had a collection in which every coin was identical except for date and mint mark. I had no inclination to start collecting by minute die varieties that require a magnifying glass to differentiate, so as I completed collections, I lost interest in each one. This brought me to type coins, in which there is more variety in designs.

Later I discovered that ancients are often less expensive than US, exceptionally widely varied, and even more historical, so I began with representative examples of various cultures and eras. After about 300 ancients I later went on to colonials, medieval coins, Renaissance coins, civil war and hard times tokens, and coins that my ancestors would have used, all by representative example rather than complete collections. This is about as un-specialized as you can get, but I have been at it for 55 years so far.

The advantages are that there is an incredibly interesting variety of designs, you learn a very wide spectrum of historical facts, there is no need for getting the rarest and most expensive coins, I can always find additional coins that could fit into the collection, and I can put together a display or talk on an enormous variety of topics by selecting the right coins from the collection.

There are a number of people out there who do not have the least interest in examining a single series for slight die variations, but could spend decades enjoying the breadth and differences in a non-specialized collection. I would specifically disagree with the conventional wisdom of recommending specialization in some one tiny area of coin collecting for everyone--some people will get bored with that but be thrilled with variety. It all depends on whether a given collector likes depth of detail or prefers the big picture.

Illinois celebrates it's Bicentennial this year. Here is a blurb from the Voting For Illinois Bicentennial Coin Contest.

Rather too late, I found this PDF of the 100th anniversary booklet about the Schulman firm, about two minutes before last week's E-Sylum arrived. It's in Dutch but clearly identifies "Jacob" as the founder and "Jacques" as a subsequent family member, even though Jacob might also very well have been known as Jacques for the reasons we've dealt with in great detail in the past week or two. On a quick skim there's no sign that there were ever two firms. Hans is mentioned as a further family member who left for the US in 1938 and traded independently there. He appears to have been a cousin of the "subsequent" Jacques as above.

The North Korean coin does not say "Destroy the United States, the Only Answer," it says "Juche is the only way to Justice." "Juche" is the supposed 'official' North Korean ideology, which posits that Korea, Koreans, and things Korean take priority over everything and everybody else. It is actually an idea/ideology that predates the North Korean state, but the North appropriated it as their own ideology under Kim Jung-eun's grandfather, Kim Il-sung.

The North Korean medal's "actual" translation goes like, "Juche-Joseon's justice's only answer" - this is a little clumsy, but actually what it says. The North comes up with "Newspeak" (Orwellian reference implied!) every once in a while, and "Juche-Joseon" seems to be one of them. "Joseon" is the name that North Korea calls itself from the official name "Joseon Minju jueui inmin gonghwa kook (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

After the North took the name "Joseon," the South resolved to call themselves something different: "Hankook," or the official name "Tae Han Min Kook" (Republic of Korea). Both "Joseon" and "Hankook" mean "Korea." Prior to the Japanese Occupation, (1910~1945) the country's name was actually "Joseon."

I read about Cannabis and Scratch-n-Sniff stamps in the last E-Sylum. I’ve long since sold my stock but the most popular coin by far from the Benin series was the marijuana scratch-n-sniff. Looking forward to Colorado...