Pocket Change Numismatic History
Homemade birthday card from John Reilly’s daughter
A while back I stumbled onto this great homemade card in the John Reilly, Jr. papers and have been waiting for February 3 to wish Mr. Reilly a happy 141st birthday. It was made by his daughter Frances (born in 1912) sometime in the late 1910s. Two decades later, in 1937, she would formally donate his Far Eastern collections to the ANS. During World War II, Frances was living in Hong Kong with her husband when the city fell to the Japanese. She was imprisoned there for nearly a year, finally coming home in late 1942. She…
John Reilly’s membership certificate for the Yokohama Numismatic Society, signed by Ramsden
There are certain numismatic personalities I expect to encounter over and…
Poking around in the ANS’s Farran Zerbe correspondence last week, I stumbled onto a couple of letters on a topic that…
George Kolbe of Kolbe & Fanning Numismatic Booksellers had an interesting question regarding my most recent column in ANS Magazine (“Bumps in the Road…
In the last few weeks, I have been preparing a gift of my personal coin collection to the American Numismatic…
American Numismatic Society
Howland Wood: long-time ANS curator, Oriental coin authority, Huntington Award winner, and…illustrator? I must admit, I didn’t know…
Ute Wartenberg Kagan, Executive Director of the American Numismatic Society, spoke about collecting coins and the conflict in Syria as…
One of the volumes that the curatorial staff often consults is a folio-sized hardbound ledger that records the first half-century…
ANS, 1983.156.7
The American Numismatic Society will be at this week’s World’s Fair of Money in Chicago. If you have an inquiry…
Joseph Cowell (1792-1863) was a British comedian and theatrical entrepreneur who performed on both sides of the Atlantic. His memoir, Thirty…