A good many years ago at the New York coin show I came upon an unidentified coin, patinated green, seemingly a Byzantine bronze scyphate. I puzzled over it as it appeared to be an unusual type, not one of the many I was familiar with. Well, it was cheap, so I bought it.

Just a few minutes later, I ran into Simon Bendall (I’d had some interactions with him before). So I showed him my new acquisition. “It’s a silver coin,” he said immediately. “Constantine IX.” Just like that. I was blown away by such depth of knowledge and memory.

That attribution was far from obvious, but of course he was right. The green patina came off revealing a silver coin, and fairly rare, of Constantine IX.

Only days ago I got a group of Michael VIII scyphates, a couple of which aren’t in his book. Running some pictures past Simon was the obvious thing to do, but now it’s moot. What a loss to numismatics.

Recent "crazy" prices for otherwise common high-grade U.S. coins with colorful toning remind me of something I learned long ago. In the early 1960s I was collecting modern world coins and visited the downtown Chicago office of dealer Frank Lapa from time to time. (Lapa later went bad and died in prison.) One day he had a selection of very recent (1960-61 or so) uncirculated minor world coins with what he called "crazy" toning for sale; it was obvious that these coins had not toned naturally, but they were certainly colorful. (They weren't particularly expensive, but I didn't buy any.)

Frank told me that one of his customers was toning them. This man would not reveal his process, but said "the coins tone themselves." Clearly it did not take very long, and worked on copper-nickel and copper coins too.

In bringing this up now, I am not suggesting that any of the coins sold recently at huge prices were artificially toned, or that the grading services are unable to detect fake toning. However, the greatest demand originally was for Morgan dollars, then classic commemorative half dollars, and now we are seeing Washington quarters and Mercury dimes. So we need to be vigilant, because the process for adding "crazy" toning to smaller coins has been around for over half a century.

I'd like to call readers' attention to another good book about the original discovery, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder. I purchased my copy from a bookstore in the trade center a few months before 9/11. I have lent it to many friends, both numismatists and noncollectors, and all thoroughly enjoyed the book.

Your mention of the strange good luck symbols caught my eye. Another professional interest of mine is the study of prehistoric rock art, i.e. petroglyphs and pictographs. Several researchers have focused on petroglyph sites called Western Message Glyphs found throughout the American West, often associated with travel routes, early mining activities, etc. They most likely date from the late 1800s and early 1900s, i.e. they overlap with the Good Luck tokens displaying strange symbols and the "Don't Worry" philosophy and clubs.

I have referred Craig Murray's website to a few of the researchers and will now refer their work to Craig. So far, there does not appear to be a one-to-one overlap in symbols, but both appear at a time when fascination with Mayan, Aztec, Ogam, Egyptian glyphs became popular in American literature. While they may be unrelated, I suspect the development of the quasi-symbolic systems has the same roots.

The original story has it wrong (misleading, at best): Rorke's Drift was in JANUARY, not July (22-23rd, 1879). So, while it is the 140th year since the battle (and the 55th since Stanley Baker's "Zulu"), the actual anniversary was six month's ago.