NNP Blog

4 DECEMBER 2021

Newman Portal Search of the Week: "Forrer"

This week a Newman Portal user searched for “Forrer.”  One of the most commonly consulted sources on the Newman Numismatic Portal is Leonard Forrer’s Biographical Dictionary of Medallists, a massive 8-volume set containing capsule summaries of engravers and coiners. Although all of these volumes have been widely scattered on the Internet for some time, the Newman Portal presentation is complete and straightforward, simply listing the six regular volumes with letters covered by each, plus the two supplements. Forrer was active at Spink in London at the turn of the 20th century and headed its coin department. The Biographical Dictionary surely consumed a great deal of his free time and was published piecemeal from 1904 to 1930.Link to Forrer’s Biographical Dictionary of Medallists on NNP: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/books?searchLetter=BImage: Forrer’s entry on Christian Gobrecht, from volume 2 (1904).