Thanks for running more on Donald Lutes Jr., the recent seller of the 1943 Bronze cent at auction. It is especially meaningful to me since Northeast was the successful buyer at the sale. Jim Halperin, Mark Borckhart and others from Heritage congratulated me immediately after it sold.

Mint error specialist Fred Weinberg did as well saying in his opinion it sold cheap as he expected it to sell for more like $300,000 given the importance of this being the discovery piece and the long term original provenance nature of the piece. I then awkwardly witnessed Fred trying to pay off a bet with Halperin that it would bring in this range.

I don't know why the press referred to the buyer as an "unnamed collector" since Heritage knew Northeast was the buyer. Although I suppose since we are currently not offering the piece for sale I guess that does make us a collector.

I'm from Agrigento, in the south of Sicily. Some days ago, I found the attached 2 euro coin. It's a 2002 coin, issued from Spain with the portrait of King Juan Carlos. Engraved on it there are the letters C A T. Never before I saw something like it. I thought maybe C A T is concise for Catalunya? Maybe someone would be interested on it, and can help me with this strange euro coin.

I'm afraid I've never encountered this marking. One might speculate that it could have been applied by Catalan independentistas, but who knows...

I thought you might like to see some of the inflation results in Germany on these tokens, a milliarden is equal to our billion.

I began buying from Jim while in my early 20s. Among my great numismatic regrets was not buying all his rare Canadian Blacksmith tokens in the mid-1970s. Jim always had rare, interesting material. Nothing seemed to be obscure, to him, in coins, medals and tokens alike. (later, he dealt a lot in Paper Money.) Quite likely, is best area was US Colonial (including Betts medals).

There were two reasons for this: 1) he was really knowledgeable, AND he was smart; and 2) he worked the supply chains in England, where, I would say, he cast American dealers in a very good light.

Jim was also unfailingly nice.

He was still doing shows until a couple years ago.

He and Richard Margolis, two of my models, were very close, and now they are gone, within months of each other.

Jim was in his early 80s A real gentleman of the old numismatic school like his friend and colleague Dick Margolis. They don’t make them like that anymore

Below is a photo of a 1917 cast iron medal by the Hungarian-born Munich medallist Elisabeth von Esseö (also spelled Essoe, as on this medal) in my collection. The image of these fighting lions is reminiscent of an ancient (Hellenistic?) coin, but thus far my online searches have failed to discover an original which she may have used as a source.

I would be grateful if any reader familiar with Classical numismatics could provide a photo, or link to a photo, of such an image along with relevant data.