I just read in The E-Sylum of the death of my good colleague Courtney L. Coffing. There was a man who packed four or five lifetimes into one! I remember reading his stories in Numismatic Scrapbook and The Numismatist in the 1950's, and was honored to work with him at Amos Press in 1974-1981. He was, of course, the "patron saint" of Notgeld, both metallic and paper, at a time few others could stand the material! When Russ Rulau jumped ship in 1974, creating a staff opening for me as it developed, Courtney was elevated to editor of both the wildly successful World Coins magazine and the foundering Numismatic Scrapbook. When management annihilated both magazines three days before the Amos Centennial in 1976, I thought Courtney would simply give up. Instead he worked manfully on long after I left Amos in 1981.

It was my exhausting privilege to criss-cross Europe with him in early 1977, discovering that Courtney knew European trains intimately, how to bail out of one train and cross nine tracks to our connector in four heartbeats! He was marvelously knowledgeable about all things German, who to see, where to go. We visited the Vienna and Paris Mints, conferred with Albert Pick at the Bayerische Hypobank, He torqued our return skillfully to fit in three extra days in Ireland, where we found the graves of my Great-grandfather and great-great grandfather in Ennis, County Clare. I bought my wedding rings at Shannon and we were soon back in New York on our way west to Sidney.

Courtney was fabulously lucky. He longed to take the New York Airways helicopter from JFK to LaGuardia airports but we missed our flight.. the one that disintegrated in the air landing atop the Pan Am building!

What a guy! He will be long remembered!

The ANS recently announced a joint project with the Newman Numismatic Portal, which will enable greater access to American numismatic research material on both the ANS Digital Library and Newman Portal websites. 
Administered through Washington University Libraries in St. Louis, the Newman Portal has contracted with Internet Archive for the scanning operation at the ANS Library. John Graffeo is operating the workstation, scanning late 19th and earlier 20th century auction catalogs. John came to the ANS as an intern working toward the completion of a master’s degree in library and information science; he has added many publications to our online catalog.

The Medal Collectors of America (MCA) will be holding its winter meeting during the NYINC. It will be held in the Sutton Room at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on Saturday January 9th at 12 pm local time, and will feature a not to be missed lecture entitled “The Lure and Lore of American Medals”, by the renowned Q. David Bowers.

Mr. Bowers has won just about every important award the hobby offers including, COINage magazine Numismatists of the Century, Professional Numismatists Guild’s highest award the Founders Award, as well as being inducted into the Numismatic Hall of Fame. We are proud to add our own Carl Carlson Award to his list of accomplishments; the Carlson was bestowed on Dave at our meeting this past August, serving well to illustrate the breadth of his knowledge extending, as it does, through the standard U.S. Mint series all the way to specialties such as historical medals.

The way I get to the Archives is to click on the current issue (after I log in, I click on the My ANA drop-down menu, then select Digital Magazines, then select the current issue) and when the current issue comes up, I click on the Archives icon in the top-left corner. The Archives open up in a window on top of the current issue, so there’s no direct URL that I can see. I use Firefox, so using another browser may yield a different experience.

You have to go to the ANA website and log in as a member. Then along the top row of tabs, select MY ANA and you get a drop-down. Select any one of the choices and wait for it to load. At the top left are four icons. Mouse over the one at the far left. It should read, "Archive Issues" in tiny font. Clicking that gets you into the complete issues that are on the ANA's website, fourteen at a time. Select any one of the issues and wait for it to load. Over to the right is a column of icons. One is a down arrow. Click that. The issue will load again. Once loaded, you can do a "save as" to your hard drive. Yet another "progress bar."

Some of the issues are upward of 150 megs and some take a long time to load. February and March 2009 do not have the down arrow. January 2009 has the down arrow, but when you click it you get a message that says, "The website declined to show this webpage."

It's a chore, but I guess it's better than nothing. The folder I have all these in is 5.69GB. I hope ANA comes out with a DVD set of the whole archive.

As an astrophysicist I was amused when I saw the "In God we Trust" above the Einstein counterstamp on the 1915 coin, since it was his scientific framework of Space-Time that gives us a rational understanding of the universe we live in, including astrophysical effects such as gravitational lensing.