ABOUT THIS ISSUE: FEBRUARY 9, 2025

It was a pretty normal week in E-Sylum Land. Throughout the week I kept up with incoming email, including new ad images from our advertisers and sponsors. Wednesday evening I picked out some articles for Garrett and sent them to him to work on. By Friday he sent me the finished products, and since he still had some time available, I gave him one more.

Regarding the new 2025 Lexington-Concord Commemorative that Northeast Numismatics is offering, Tom Caldwell shared that "They are selling like cupcakes. We once had a customer say that to us when he meant to say hot cakes.". Now I'm hungry for a cupcake.

Saturday morning I got started on the issue itself, copying and editing a template file to set up the new issue number and date, then pasting in the third and final segment of the series on collectible counterfeits. We'd formatted the entire series in advance, and this one was waiting in my hold file.

I took a break to read incoming newsletters, alerts and news in the popular press. Sometimes I find timely items to include in our issue, and this week I made note of some items in the Greysheet News. I also added and welcomed a couple new subscribers.

The next step was inserting and reviewing Garrett's articles, which gave me a welcome head start on the issue. By Saturday night I had about 19 articles done. Sunday morning I worked on something that had been in the backlog for a while - Bob Rhue's Georgia colonial currency exhibit. I created seven articles and we ran the first one tonight. The others are on hold for future issues.

Responding to a question from Ray Williams I shared how I find material for each issue - while a number of items come from readers and regular contributors, I also sign up for newsletters and notifications that come by email. Most of the bigger coin dealers and clubs have those. I don't bother going to the coin chat rooms. If anything interesting shows up there, usually someone will notify me. I go to Facebook once a day, and if I see anything of interest I'll share it to myself by email. I don't bother with most social media. I do have subscriptions to the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal and often find something that I'll share with myself in email. On the weekend I plow thru the email to build Sunday's issue.

-Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is a Senior Honors student at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org site, making the club and our E-Sylum archive available to collectors and researchers worldwide.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.