This summer I took my youngest daughter Elyce on a Smithsonian tour, “Art Treasures of Italy.” Our group started in Venice and visited Florence and finally Rome. I chose this tour as Elyce is an art history major and is studying Italian as a language. Another consideration was that I hadn’t been to that part of Italy since the 1960s when I was in college – and back then, I was doing Europe with Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day.   The Smithsonian tour was great, and for me, visiting Rome was a real highlight. Although not included in our tour, during some free time we explored the ancient Roman Forum and the Colosseum. The nice thing about touring ancient sites is they don’t visibly change even with 40 years between visits. I love collecting and dealing in U.S. coins and paper currency but I enjoy ancient coins equally as much. It was a thrill for us to walk where Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Nero walked, and to think of their coins.   In the top photo, I’m standing in the Roman Forum by the steps to the temple dedicated by Emperor Antoninus Pius to his late wife Faustina in A.D. 141. Shown is a rare gold Aureus depicting Faustina and this temple as it originally appeared – the temple was saved from total destruction as part of it was built into a church in the 7th century. Also shown is a bronze Sestertius of Emperor Nero, who set fire to Rome in a moment of insanity, with the deity Roma on the reverse symbolizing the spirit of Rome. Probably the most famous symbol of Rome is the depiction of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome with the she-wolf, as shown on the reverse of the URBS ROMA “Wolf & Twins.” All of these coins are history you can hold in your hand.

 

More Bits & Pieces… by David Sundman

 

Milwaukee, Wisconsin was a great setting for the 2007 American Numismatic Association’s World’s Fair of Money held August 6-12. The ANA summer convention is always the high point of the year for me and for our staff.

 

In addition to our expert buyers, our coin album and supplies department has a booth at each annual ANA World’s Fair of Money. This gives us an occasion to display our full album, coin and paper money supplies product line, and to enroll new Littleton album distributors and retailers.

 

Seen in the photo to the right at the Littleton Coin Supplies booth is new Littleton V.P. and Chief Financial Officer John Hennessey. Standing with him are Business to Business Manager Jill Kimball, Catalog & Direct Mail Manager Erin Petelle, and Treasurer Ed Hennessey. John grew up in Littleton and recently joined our firm after a successful career with AMN Healthcare Services, Inc. in San Diego. He is a Certified Public Accountant and a 1998 Magna Cum Laude graduate with a B.S. in accounting from the Carroll School of Management of Boston College. And yes, John and Ed are related!

 

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On Tuesday, August 7 I was pleased to run into retired numismatic publisher and newly elected ANA board member Chester L. Krause. Chet was busy with a volunteer staff putting out for display more than 150 exhibit cases of his prize winning Wisconsin Bank Note Collection. When I have exhibited at various ANA and FUN (Florida United Numismatists) conventions, putting out even four cases takes a lot of time. So you can imagine the effort in putting out 150 cases. Of course the real pleasure and effort was in building the collection over 40 plus years. This is an exhibit the likes of which will probably never be seen again, so it’s truly a delight to see! But the greatest fun was getting to spend a little time listening to Chet talk about his collection, and how he built it. Often he would buy an entire collection just to obtain one or two scarce notes he needed!

 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens is an artist most familiar to collectors of American gold coins. At the Smithsonian Institution’s excellent exhibit in Milwaukee featuring the coins of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, I met Greg Schwarz of the National Park Service. Greg is Chief of Interpretation at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire. (See http://www.nps.gov/saga) Saint-Gaudens’s summer home was in Cornish, about an hour and a half from Littleton. I have visited the site several times over the years, but am going to make a new pilgrimage sometime this fall. Tentative plans are now being made for a 2 day seminar celebrating Saint-Gaudens’s numismatic legacy, sponsored by Coin World, Littleton Coin Company, Stack’s, and Whitman Publishing, LLC sometime in the summer of 2008. More details will follow.

 

 

Morgan dollars (1878-1921) are one of my absolute favorite U.S. coins – but have you ever seen an actual Morgan dollar coin die? Former ANA president Robert Campbell featured an 1878 cancelled die in his case and allowed me to take this photo. This die was for sale and despite the rust on the die, I was sorely tempted. What a wonderful display item for a top exhibit of Morgan dollars.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although I try to remain on the bourse floor most of the time, Thursday, August 9 was a day that offered a number of interesting educational talks. Shown below is paper money expert Peter Huntoon, giving his presentation on Confederate National Bank Notes at the Maynard Sundman Lecture portion of the Numismatic Theatre. Littleton Coin sponsors this series of presentations by some of America’s leading numismatic scholars to support and encourage numismatic scholarship. The series is named in honor of my father F. Maynard Sundman, founder of Littleton Coin Company. Peter’s talk was well attended, despite the many simultaneous lectures and meetings going on – and the coin bourse itself. Each of the seven speakers at the 2007 Maynard Sundman Lecture will have their final paper published in a forthcoming issue of ANA Journal: Advanced Studies in Numismatics following the symposium. This scholarly journal is a new product of the ANA. Subscription information can be obtained by calling the American Numismatic Association at 800-467-5725, or by visiting their website.

 

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Joel Orosz, Ph.D., is a well known numismatic author and board member of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society. Here he is giving a slide lecture with Leonard Augsburger [not shown] to an audience of 35 at the NBS annual meeting in Milwaukee. The talk was a teaser for the book Len and Joel are now finishing about images featuring the first U.S. Mint in Philadelphia.

 

One of my loves is collecting and reading numismatic books. In a moment of weakness a couple of years ago I agreed to run for election for Secretary-Treasurer of the NBS. I have found that once you win that office, no one seems to want to run against you so I am probably in for a long time. Collectors of numismatic books and literature are a fun group with a very dry sense of humor, as you can tell from the title of the organization. Bibliomania has been described as “a disorder involving the collecting of books… to the point where social relations or health are damaged.” The Numismatic Bibliomania Society is a non-profit organization promoting the enjoyment and collecting of numismatic literature both old and new. For more information, please see our web site at http://www.coinbooks.org/. If you are bookish by nature and enjoy numismatic book collecting yourself, a membership application is available online. To join, print the application and return it with your check to the address printed on the application. Membership is only $15 to addresses in the U.S., $20 elsewhere. For those without web access, write to: David M. Sundman, Secretary/Treasurer, Numismatic Bibliomania Society, P. O. Box 82 Littleton, NH 03561