MACO Specimen Archive

The MACO specimen archive is a collection of PDFs that lists nearly all medals produced by the Medallic Art Company between 1907 and 2013.

The MACO Specimen Image Archives are a group of PDFs that the ANS acquired with the purchase of the MACO archives. It is a list of nearly all of the medals that the company produced between 1907 and 2013. These are the actual documents that MACO used in its internal offices and minting facilities as a record of the pieces that they minted in the past. They were based off of the medals archive held by the company—a nearly complete set of MACO medals. As you can see, each page is headed “Proprietary and Confidential—Not For Distribution,” meaning that this is the first glimpse into the full list of MACO products that most people have ever seen.

However, the MACO Specimen Image Archive is wrought with errors on many different levels. First, it’s not complete. There is only one section mission, 2010–2013, but there are individual medals missing from the PDFs that are present. These missing medals include some nationally important pieces, such as the Pulitzer Prize Medal commissioned by Columbia University in 1917, as well as medals commissioned by the ANS itself, such as the 1908 Grover Cleveland Memorial plaquette and the 1908 Archdiocese of New York medal.

Within individual listings there are also many errors. These include mishaps like wrong, missing, or swapped images, wrong artist names for certain pieces, and missing or wrong compositions and/or sizes. As the ANS moves forward with the MACO archives, a primary goal is to make all of the corrections, take better photos of the material, and republish the Specimen Image Archive as the first complete catalogue of MACO products.