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UNSOLVED NUMISMATIC PUZZLES FROM DUBLINGawain O'Connor writes: "Perhaps your item about puzzles is not totally non-numismatic after all. The Hordern-Dalgety Collection of puzzles still has a website at https://www.puzzlemuseum.com/ "A couple items that I have wondered about for years are on their unsolved puzzles page: https://www.puzzlemuseum.com/month/picm02/200206dublin.htm "I wonder if anyone has ever solved these. Perhaps modern deciphering techniques can help... "Johnson was in business a hundred years ago, but I haven't found their successors, or anyone who might know something about the solution." Thank you! I hadn't seen these before. Anyone want to try their hand at these? -Editor
VERY PUZZLING COINS FROM DUBLIN
This very small (16mm diameter) silver token probably dates from the late 19th Century. We guess that a prize of £500 was offered for deciphering the message:- "ASRWSROIOEHWUOMNEMPHNE" Five hundred pounds would have been a very large sum. We have not been able to decipher the message so will give a small prize, definitely not £500, to the first person to tell us the answer. 
Johnson of Dublin also made this larger (27mm diameter x 2.5 mm thick) medal for the Irish Village at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. We will give another small prize, definitely not $1000, for the first person to decipher this:- "AETENVMTEFISIRISTSEALI"
To read a lot descriptions from current and earlier sales, see:
All of the £500 pieces are holed - why? Secret codes are also in the mainstream news - here's a Washington Post article about a code found hidden in a late 19th-century woman's dress. -Editor The mystery was sparked when archaeologist and antique fashion collector Sara Rivers Cofield purchased an 1880s-era silk gown at a Maine antique mall in 2013. The bronze-colored dress held a secret: A hidden pocket beneath the bustle contained crumpled, handwritten notes covered with place names, seemingly random words and numbers. Suspecting the notes were in code, Cofield posted the puzzle online, where it intrigued — and stymied — cryptographers. Eventually, the dress earned a place on code aficionados' lists of ongoing mysteries — until Wayne Chan, an analyst with the University of Manitoba's Center for Earth Observation Science, got a hold of it.
To read the complete article, see:
To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
Wayne Homren, Editor The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting numismatic literature. See our web site at coinbooks.org. To submit items for publication in The E-Sylum, write to the Editor at this address: whomren@gmail.com To subscribe go to: https://my.binhost.com/lists/listinfo/esylum All Rights Reserved. NBS Home Page Contact the NBS webmaster 
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