Getting to Know Eric P. Newman, Part 1

Lianna Spurrier is well-known to NNP users and has completed two video series for Newman Portal, including same-day coverage of the 2019 World’s Fair of Money and a group of videos aimed at young numismatists. Spurrier now starts a new video series focused on publications of Eric P. Newman. The first entry focuses on Newman’s 1959 work The Secret of the Good Samaritan Shilling. One of the most notorious fabrications in American numismatics, this piece sold for $650 in the Bushnell (1882) sale. By way of comparison a Birch cent from the same collection sold at $290. Newman demonstrated that the Good Samaritan counterstamp on a Pine Tree shilling was not contemporary, and hoped that he would be a “Good Samaritan” in having set the record straight. The work combined Newman’s interest in colonial numismatics and expertise in counterfeit detection, and is neatly explicated in this new video by Spurrier.Link to Secret of the Good Samaritan Shilling video on NNP: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/570537Link to Ford/Hamelberg copy of the Bushnell sale on NNP: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/auctionlots?AucCoId=21&AuctionId=510831