Sad news for Smithsonian Público Deposited
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[Colonial Numismatics] Re
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- From rogermoore435@yahoo.com Tue Apr 20 08:21:08 2004
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Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 08:21:08 -0700 (PDT)
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From: Roger Moore <rogermoore435@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Colonial Numismatics] Re: Sad news for Smithsonian
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Thank you John for sharing this extteordinary story.
I was wondering how you got statred attributing
Virginians. I will cross reference to the Virginia
group. Roger
--- "John M. Kleeberg" <jmkleeberg@yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- 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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