Last week Bruce Bartelt asked if there was "a full written account and inventory of the lost items" from the 1831 theft from the Cabinet of Medals of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Hadrien Rambach provided a link to just such a document. Thank you! It is Henry Cohen's manuscript Liste des médaillons et des médailles d'or qui ont été volées en 1831 au Cabinet des médailles et qui n'ont pas encore été remplacées jusqu'à ce jour, written in 1863. Here's the Google-translated description. -Editor

"Thank you to M. Rambach – quite a massive loss."

"In Alan Weinberg's comments about famous coin thefts he observed that the DuPont Family's 1866 No Motto silver dollar was unique and was never recovered, but neither statement is true. John Kraljevich was able to confirm a piece he examined as the DuPont Specimen while he was working with Stacks-Bowers around 2004. A collector had contacted the company saying he had what he believed to be a rare coin, and that certainly was true. I don't believe its whereabouts between 1967 and 2004 was ever fully determined.

"There was a photo of myself holding that specimen after NGC certified it as PF-65, and I was in the company of Chris Karstedt and Dave Bowers. I don't recall where that photo was posted; it may have been in one of the old NGC newsletters. I'm attaching a couple photos of the coin. Unfortunately, they're low resolution, but they're good enough to distinguish this example from the Brand Specimen, which NGC graded PF-63 back in the 90s.

"Interestingly, in the late 1990s NGC certified DuPont's 1866 No Motto half dollar, which really is a unique piece, but it seems that the graders failed to recognize they were handling a great rarity and a coin that had been stolen decades earlier. A few weeks later, when I was trying to reconcile coins that failed to turn up data numbers in our Census, I saw that we'd certified an 1866 No Motto proof half dollar recently and asked whether anyone had thought to take a photo, explaining its significance. I was about to report the news to Coin World when the story broke that Superior had purchased the half across the counter, which is how it made its way to NGC. Incredibly, it was claimed that this unique rarity was acquired as just a proof type coin."

"Correction: the Inaugural medal picture Alan Weinberg submitted was stolen from the University of Virginia Library, not Monticello. Monticello has never suffered a theft from their small but important collection of numismatic items."

Thanks for setting us straight. Still an important missing item that hopefully can be located someday and restored to its rightful owners. -Editor