BOOK REVIEW: THE PUBLICATIONS OF ERIC P. NEWMAN

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V28 2025 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 28, Number 10, , Article 7

Christopher???? McDowell submitted this review of the new book on the publications of Eric P. Newman. Thank you! To order a copy, see the earlier article linked below. -Editor

You Can Judge A Book By Its Cover.
A Review of The Publications of Eric P. Newman: A Collector's Guide.
By Christopher R. McDowell, Esq.

publications of Eric P. Newman book cover

I must be Kolbe & Fanning's favorite customer. I buy every new book on colonial numismatics and many older ones. In addition, people send me books and articles to read and review, with some arriving unannounced on my front porch like foundlings. Many of these books and articles get little more than a passing glance before being put on a shelf. Others are given a premium spot in my library, and a select few make it next to my bed. The Publications of Eric P. Newman: A Collector's Guide by Leonard Augsburger & Joel Orosz, with a foreword by Kenneth Bressett, and published by Kolbe & Fanning 2025, is on my nightstand. I am a big fan of the authors' previous collaborative efforts, including Truth Seeker: The Life of Eric P. Newman and 1792: Birth of a Nation's Coinage.

The first thing that struck me when the book arrived was the fabulous dust jacket showing a young Eric Newman with a rich, bright red background. A similar red color scheme was used on the Heritage auction catalogs of his collection and for the Truth Seeker cover. I later learned that the Newman home was partially decorated in red, which was a color many came to associate with him. Maria Fanning designed the cover and contributed to the book's graphics and layout. Maria has prepared the layout for many numismatic publications over the years, and this one is a stunner. The cover so captivated me that I was immediately drawn to look inside. The images, of which there are many illustrating the listings, are in sharp color and really pop from the page. From a production standpoint, this book stands out. Indeed, it may be the finest numismatic work from a production point of view I have ever seen. This sort of thing may go unnoticed by most people, but I have come to believe that the attention to detail paid by authors and publishers to these features foretells what the reader will discover inside. This book epitomizes that theory.

Don't be misled by the title. This book is not a dry recitation of Newman's works. It's a comprehensive guide, an absorbing read that lists everything Newman authored in the field of numismatics, covering the entire modern era of American colonial numismatic research. The first article is dated 1941, and the last listing is the posthumously printed 2022 edition of The Early Paper Money of America. The final article published during his lifetime was a work on the Continental Currency Dollar in July 2017, when he was 106 years old!

It can be forcefully argued that the investigative research style we have become accustomed to in our hobby was ushered in by Newman's 1959 classic "The Secret of the Good Samaritan Shilling: Supplemented with Notes on Other Genuine and Counterfeit Massachusetts Silver Coins." With all the books and articles I review and edit as the President of the Colonial Coin Collectors Club (C-4) and The Journal of Early American Numismatics editor, there is precious little time to go over anything twice. However, I re-read his Good Samaritan article with greater and greater amazement and appreciation every few years; it is like an Agatha Christie mystery novel with Newman as the police inspector trying to solve the 200-year-old cold case of the Good Samaritan Shilling. If there is a perfect numismatic research article, this is it. Perhaps, with today's AI-assisted computer search capabilities, it might be possible for someone to piece this story together—that Newman was able to gather obscure clues from across two continents to definitively answer this mystery at the dawn of the jet-age when computers were housed in buildings instead of your pocket, speaks to his raw genius and tenacity as a research detective and author.

The book is not just a listing of Newman's publications. It goes beyond that, providing integral context by drawing upon the Newman papers, an incomparable archival record of his research. Newman was the quintessential antiquarian who carefully saved a long lifetime of numismatic correspondence and research. Upon his death, hundreds of boxes of numismatic correspondence were found in his basement, with more stowed away at other locations. Thanks to the Newman Numismatic Portal, these papers can be found and searched today. The papers are a treasure trove of information for modern researchers. This book represents an effort to connect Newman's research papers more closely with his corresponding publications while also revealing forgotten publications that are now captured in this bibliography for the first time. Each work is summarized with many contextual insights that clarify points from Newman's extensive papers that would not otherwise be apparent to the reader.

Newman's prodigious corpus of work has influenced almost every aspect of the study of American colonial numismatics. His research forms the foundation of much of what we read in the field today. In 1675, another famous numismatist, Sir Isaac Newton, quipped, "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." If today, we see far, it is because Eric Newman has hoisted us up upon his shoulders. This book helps us appreciate where we came from and how we got here. To know where we are going in colonial numismatics, we need to know where we came from, and the best way to do that is to read this book.