"My compliments on your October 20 E-Sylum issue, excellent as always. I particularly enjoyed Steve Feller's story on the Earliest Surviving Confederate issue, his Montgomery $100 T-3 serial number 6 note. Great article, and a nice adjunct to Mr. Feller's ongoing series of articles on the highest reported serial number for the T-64 $500 Stonewall Jackson notes. Kudos to Mr. Feller and kudos to the NBS E-Sylum."

Thank you, and thanks to Steve. We get the best material and leads from our readers. -Editor

"Before I joined Stack's Carl Carlson and I maintained a friendly cataloguers' competition by mail. We'd take a catalogue description of an auction lot coin and write a completely made up alternative description of the coin or its type. The funnier and more out of the park the description was the better. Neither of us ever "won", the fun was in the writing. "

It's not April Fool's Day yet, but this would make a great contest. I'd like readers to send in a mix of fake and real-but-so-weird-they-look-fake lot descriptions. We'll see who can get the most right.

To kick us off, here's Mike's creative writeup of the Sponsian piece pictured last week. Thanks! -Editor

"I'm recalling that in the year 2000, there was a push to get every country in the world to use the word 'peace' on a coin. I can't find anything online. By chance, do you remember this?"

I don't. Does this ring a bell with readers? Surely there would have been some articles about the proposal in the numismatic press, whether it came to be or not. But the word is common and there are so many, many articles mentioning the Peace dollar that it could be hard to narrow down a search without more information. What person or organization was promoting the idea? -Editor

"I recently acquired a group of about 40 different civil war era cardboard chits. While trying to research them I ran across an E-sylum article from 2006 that discussed them. I can find little else about them other than what is mentioned in this article, a Paper Money article and a few items in auctions.

"The 2006 article mentions there was not a catalog of them at that time and I assume there is still not a catalog of them.

"I'm looking for anyone else who collects these or may be able to provide additional information about them. I can be contacted at mufelika@gmail.com.

"One or two have remnants of stamp hinges and the round, red one on bottom was glued to something. Many have signatures or initials on backs.

"I intend to put my ancestry.com and newspapers.com accounts to good use digging for information on the proprietors but don't want to muddy my shoes if someone has already trod on that ground for some of them."

That's amazing. These are very scarce. I only acquired one small lot of these when I was building my Civil War collection. -Editor

"Most of these appear to be from the Civil War era. I recognize a few of them but most are probably unique. The only common ones are the Mathews & Bro. chits from New York City. I wrote up a couple of stories about them and can look up the citations if interested.

"David Schenkman wrote an extensive piece recently in the Civil War Token Society's journal Civil War Era Numismatics about round cardboard chits, mostly issued in the 1850s and 1860s.

"You can review many city directories on line. Most of the surviving chits are from New York City so be sure to look up names in the 1863 NYC Directory. I have the 1860 one here."

"The proposed new cent with the liberty bell and the small 250 is a serious JOKE!!!

"It's the equivalent of the 1996 'W' dime when we could have had a new design.

"This proposal is so lame it actually reminds me of this old Lincoln cent with a design of Kennedy added."

That "Kennedy" cent brings back memories of my young collector days. I might have had one of these at one point. The image seems larger and more amateurish than I recall. Wayne's image comes from an Amazon listing - this may be a recent Chinese product. So I guess someday there will be a catalog of these with all the varieties pictured...

As to the "privy mark", it's a pretty lame commemoration of a once-in-a-lifetime anniversary, but better than nothing, I suppose. As Coin World notes, new designs for the larger denominations are in the works. -Editor

U.S. Mint officials have the option for a complete redesign for all circulating U.S. coin denominations for 2026 only, but pursued only minor modifications for the two smallest denominations.

Obverse and reverse design overhauls are expected for the Roosevelt dime and Kennedy half dollars, along with multiple redesigns for the quarter dollar issues.

"See the catalogue below from a British dealer I know. Several numismatic books including an impressive sammelband (no. 3) of American catalogs (most unrecorded or known in one copy only) as well as no. 52."

By "unrecorded" the seller means unrecorded in WorldCat, thus not found in major mainstream libraries. The catalogs are likely available individually in public and private numismatic libraries. Still, it's a great one-volume collection. Here are images of that lot and other numismatic or numismatic-adjacent items in the offering. -Editor