ABOUT THIS ISSUE: APRIL 20, 2025

About the middle of each week I start forwarding material to Garrett Ziss to work on for the next issue. This week I asked if he could maybe, if needed, perhaps put in a few more hours this time. I wasn't entirely sure I'd be up to finishing the issue normally - I was scheduled for cataract surgery Thursday. But it went quite well and I was fine for the weekend editing extravaganza. One eye down, one to go in another couple weeks. Everyone I've talked to who's had the surgery told me I'd be happy with the results, and they were right. My world is much clearer and brighter.

I had fewer hours available than normal because our daughter was home from college and Saturday night we celebrated her 21st birthday with a nice dinner and cake afterwards with friends and neighbors.

A lot of my time this week was spent working on obituaries. We published two good ones (although we're never happy to hear of someone's passing, we're always glad to celebrate their numismatic lives). Word of a third came too late to work on, and we'll save that for a future issue.

As a fan of Trompe L'oeil "fool the eye" art from artists such as William Harnett, I enjoyed seeing this old Bizarro cartoon today. Your world is what you make of it. -Editor

To read the complete article, see:
Drawing Conclusions (https://www.bizarro.com/blog/2025/4/20/drawn-conclusions)

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.