Sad to see that John Whitney Walter has left us - another great collector and scholar. Another of the amazing groups of coins he put together was the collection of coins of the "Demareteion master" also featured in a Stack's catalog and donated to the Smithsonian (I had the privilege of putting together an exhibit of the coins).

While I can’t say I knew John Whitney Walter well, I did know and interact with him over a good number of years. It certainly saddened me to read of his passing in last week’s E-Sylum. He was much more than a great and dedicated collector. He was, in my experience, a wonderful and caring human being. My interactions with him came largely as a consequence of our parallel service on the council of the American Numismatic Society, and around the exhibit areas at American Numismatic Association conventions.

One of his attributes that stands out the most to me is observing him sticking around his installed exhibits at ANA conventions, which were always superlative as previously referenced, sharing insights into the attributes of the exhibited collections he had built with anyone who happened by and was drawn to stop and explore. As I said, I always found John to be dedicated and caring in his appreciation and confidence for the merits of our hobby community. Few emulate, unfortunately, his example.

Thank you for publishing my note about forming a Brazil American Numismatic Association. I've already gotten my first response!

Dick Johnson says none are known. Teddy Roosevelt might be classed as a medals collector, as he seems to have known --and recommended-- coin designers V. D. Brenner and Augustus St. Gaudens from pieces he owned.

Stack's conducted an auction in the early 1970s of a significant coin collection from John and John Quincy Adams, de-accessioned from a museum (Peabody-Essex??). It is likely J. Q. was the collector, and some of the coins were casually saved by his father.

Since I spent over 12 years developing software for automated analysis of galaxy images of NASA Hubble Space Telescope I know it should not be too difficult to develop automated coin grading for modern minted coins using high resolution scanned or uniformly photographed images and cross-correlation techniques to develop a grade based on the cross-correlated distribution function. High grade coins will have a sharp peak, which will soften for lower grades. This method will be more difficult for ancient coins, where the image on flan may be incomplete. But even that is simpler than face recognition.

However, grading services don't even give more basic information like weight of coin, dimensions such as thickness. Another useful piece of information is specific gravity, but that is not easy to measure, unless some ultrasound techniques are developed and calibrated. What I find most useful is XRF measurements of surface metallurgy composition. All of which can't be measured after a coin is slabbed.

Currently I am trying to get an Institution in Sri Lanka to purchase an XRF machine which costs around US$100K which can determine impurities to study ancient Lankan coins. Macro tests using XRF now available in jewelry stores in Sri Lanka for under US$1 per measurement have proven to me that the 11th century Lankan Gold coin which was sold to me by Spink at the coin show in Baltimore back in 1993 is a modern forgery. Anyway that got me started in collecting Lankan coins, but shows how important these modern measurements are in trying to identify forgeries. See http://coins.lakdiva.org/medievalgold/k1cf4t10c_adahanda_au.html .

Each year the ANA Summer Seminar features a pair of auctions to benefit the YN scholarship fund. These are held at the end of each week of the two-week event, with the catalogs prepared by the YNs themselves during the week. These auctions rely on donated material from the numismatic community (typical value $25 and up), and, to that end, YN Kenny Sammut has produced a video with an overview of the auction sale.

If you’ve got a few odd things in your collection (and who doesn’t?) this is great opportunity to clean out the bank box and refine your collecting objectives. It’s for a great cause, and your life will be slightly more organized as a result! The ANA will provide acknowledgment of all gifts. Contact Kenny Sammut via email, at numismatistkenny@gmail.com, for further info.

Fastest sale I ever made was to a dealer in US Coins, at a Long Beach show. It was a book, a modern Scottish play called "The Slab Boys." Evidently, the boys mixed paints on marble slabs at a carpet factory. As I recall, I bought it from a street seller, coming out of the subway at First Ave and First Street, for $1 to $3, and I sold it for $10-15. This is a typical margin, for me at least, on book sales. In addition, books entail little quarreling over price and condition.

Reames said he suspects someone has been buying the book using stolen credit and/or debit cards, and pocketing the 60 percent that Amazon gives to authors. At $555 a pop, it would only take approximately 70 sales over three months to rack up the earnings that Amazon said he made.