Last week I put out a call for early paper money publications, particularly the price lists and journals published in the 1950s and 60s by Dwight Musser prior to the formation of the Society of Paper Money Collectors and the International Bank Note Society. Howard Daniel is sending me one Musser product, -Editor

"Neil Shafer put out the first Paper Money Catalog of the Philippine Islands in 1962. Until them there was a big hole in knowledge about the US issues for the Philippines."

Thanks, everyone. -Editor

"I had recognised the name of Reed & Barton from reading about silversmiths and pewterers. According to my recollection the firm had been located in Taunton, Massachusetts. I checked Wikipedia, and that source confirmed the attribution.

"Thanks for your continued service editing the excellent E-Sylum!"

You're welcome. Thanks for your note.

The firm was referenced in last week's Vocabulary article on medal manufacturing excerpted from Dick Johnsons' Encyclopedia of Coin and Medal Terminology. -Editor

"Your brief comment about the error in the Young America Furnace note leads readily to a discussion of a phrase in common usage, but of which many of your readers may not have considered the literal meaning: One often speaks of "minding one's p's and q's", by which is understood an admonition to mind one's own business. Yet, the phrase has a specific intent, and derives from the world of printing. In most Roman alphabets and fonts in lower case are direct reversals of one another, each rendered backwards in type. Thus P (q) and Q (p) are remarkably similar. Moreover, in most standard type case layouts, the compartments for the two are adjacent or near adjacent to each other. The lowly apprentice, or wonderfully-named "Printer's Devil", charged with the distribution of type could easily be distracted and replace type incorrectly. Hence the phrase...

"There are several other well-known idiomata which derive from publishing or printing, but these will have to wait, for another edition as it were..."

Thank you. A Snopes.com article addressed this phrase, but came to no definitive conclusion. But the Printer's Devil explanation "holds the most water" for me, although there may be no "smoking gun" to prove any of the explanations. -Editor