NNP Blog

4 DECEMBER 2021

Alexandre Vattemare Addenda Rediscovered

Wayne Homren recently purchased a DVD compilation of public domain works on numismatics. The description of this offering included a work on American numismatics by Alexandre Vattemare, dated 1864. Vattemare’s 1861 volume, Collection de Monnaies et Médailles de L'Amérique du Nord de 1652 a 1858, is well-known and represents one of the earliest catalogs of U.S. coinage. This 1864 work was completely unknown to Wayne, or Len Augsburger. After receiving the DVD, Wayne discovered, with the help of the numismatist’s friend Google, that the 1864 work was actually an article published by Vattemare in the Revue Numismatique for that year. This article expands upon and reorganizes Vattemare’s chapter on Hard Times tokens from the 1861 book. Vattemare perhaps envisioned a second edition of the 1861 volume, but was able to publish only this revised chapter.The most recent English biography of Vattemare is Q. David Bowers’ Alexandre Vattemare and the Numismatic Scene (Stack’s Bowers, 2018), with foreword by David Gladfelter.Link to Vattemare’s Revue Numismatique 1864 article on Newman Portal: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/publisherdetail/541416Link to Vattemare’s Collection de Monnaies et Médailles de L'Amérique du Nord de 1652 a 1858: https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/booksbyauthor/537242