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- From jmkleeberg@yahoo.com Tue Apr 20 07:10:38 2004
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Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:10:30 -0000
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From: "John M. Kleeberg" <jmkleeberg@yahoo.com>
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Subject: Re: Sad news for Smithsonian
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--- In colonial-coins@yahoogroups.com, "Steven G Frank"
<taxi_steve929@y...> wrote:
> The Smithsonian could put EVERYTHING on display.....right here
> online!!
Actually, there is an instance of that happening with another museum
collection - the Library of Notre Dame. And that's a very positive
museum story, and illustrates well the nuances and ambiguities of
the problem.
At some point in the late nineteenth century someone - JCS has made
the very exciting suggestion that it was Horatio N. Rust - donated a
large group of coppers to Notre Dame. The collection was stored
away in the library, and nobody really looked at it for a century.
Fast forward to the 1990s. Robert Gore donated a very nice type set
of colonial coins to Notre Dame, and the librarian, Lou Jordan,
wanted someone to come out and look at it and I was invited to do so
and to give a lecture. I looked through the type set, but there
wasn't very much I could contribute, because someone had cataloged
it very assiduously before me and all the attributions appeared to
be correct; in fact, the only coins that were unattributed were the
Virginia halfpence, and that's how I started out in attributing
Virginia halfpence by Newman variety... Friday night at dinner Lou
mentioned that there was another collection of coins in the library,
but it was just a pile of junk. I said I should probably look at it
anyway. So we arranged to go in on a Saturday. I didn't expect to
see much of anything, but I figured I might as well be conscientious
and see everything there was to see. We went into the small vault
room and Lou turned on the light and pulled out some albums, and I
began to look through it, and what do I see on the first page I pull
out - but a bunch of Machin's pieces! (These I can recognize very
readily, using, as you know, my "George III wearing lipstick"
technique.) I turn over more pages, and there are more Machin's
pieces, and next thing I know, there's a Vlack 14-84A! I thought to
myself, "Now I know how Mike R. must feel nearly every day." So I
said to Lou, "This is an extraordinary collection. It complements
very nicely the typeset. In fact, there are pieces here that are
much rarer than anything in the typeset."
Notre Dame library had just put one of the first research areas on
the web - a Dante project, and I remember Lou saying to his
boss, "We could be the first place to put coins on the web!" And
they were. They did a lot of work with JCS, and the result is that
there is now a huge website with vast amounts of resources about
colonial coins. And Lou has done a lot of other work in this field,
such as being an editor of CNL and writing his book about
Massachusetts silver coinage.
So was it worthwhile for the donor to give his coins to the library
of Notre Dame? The answer depends upon when you answer it. As of
1987 you might say - "What a waste, the collection was hidden away
in the basement and nobody saw it." As of today, we can say - "That
donation has had extraordinarily positive effects for numismatic
research." Thank you, Lou, Jim, Robert Gore, Notre Dame, and (I
think) Horatio!
John M. Kleeberg
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