IN OTHER NEWS: JULY 8, 2018

1904 Olympic Gold Medal Brings $125,000

To read the complete lot description and price realized, see:
BASKETBALL — An Olympic Gold Medal awarded for Basketball to George Louis Redlein (1885-1968), St. Louis, 1904. (https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/basketball-an-olympic-gold-medal-awarded-6145960-details.aspx)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
1904 OLYMPIC GOLD MEDAL FOR BASKETBALL (http://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n20a32.html)

Will The New Academy Issue A Prize Medal?

The Swedish Academy is not awarding a Nobel prize for literature this year, but a group of Swedish cultural figures are coming together to bestow their own version of the world's most prestigious literary award instead, as an act of protest at the scandal that has engulfed the academy.

The scandal, which kickstarted debate about the academy's patriarchal nature and fights in the Swedish media between academicians, led to a wave of resignations and to the postponement of this year's prize "in view of the currently diminished academy and the reduced public confidence".

In its place, more than 100 Swedish writers, actors, journalists and other cultural figures have formed the New Academy, which will hand out its own award this autumn, following the same timeline as the Nobel.

To read the complete article, see:
Alternative Nobel literature prize planned in Sweden (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/02/alternative-nobel-literature-prize-planned-in-sweden)

Post Office Owes $3.55 Million Over Statue Mixup

Left: Original Statue of Liberty
Right: Robert Davidson's Las Vegas replica

A sculptor who created a replica of the Statue of Liberty for a Las Vegas casino was awarded $3.5 million in damages last week after the US Postal Service (USPS) accidentally used a photo of his statue   rather than a photo of the original statue in New York harbor – on one of its most common stamps.

If you bought a "forever" stamp between 2011 and 2014, there's a good chance that it showed the face of the Statue of Liberty replica that sculptor Robert Davidson constructed for the New York-New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The Post Office licensed a photo of Davidson's statue from the image service Getty for $1,500, initially believing it was a photograph of the original statue. (The license only covered the rights to Getty's photograph of the statue – not the statue itself.)

The stamp with the resulting image was released to the public in December 2010; it took four months before anyone pointed out the mistake to the Post Office.

To read the complete article, see:
Post Office owes $3.5M for using wrong Statue of Liberty on a stamp (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/07/post-office-owes-3-5m-for-using-wrong-statue-of-liberty-on-a-stamp/)

See also:
Postal Service misidentifies Statue of Liberty in stamp in a $3.5 million mistake (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/07/06/postal-service-misidentifies-statue-liberty-stamp-million-mistake/762306002/)

Harry Waterson writes:

FIDEM Medals 2018

Every two years, the world's largest organization of medal artists and other aficionados of the medal comes together at the FIDEM congress. The acronym is a French one: "Federation Internationale de la Medaille," which is pretty easily translated to: International Federation of the Medal. Held at a different location each time, this year's federation or medals congress was in Ottawa, Ontario, hosted in large part by the Royal Canadian Mint and the Canadian Museum of Nature. It featured artists, scholars, collectors and others who are interested in any aspect of medal making and collecting.

To read the complete article, see:
Medals of FIDEM: Breaths of fresh creative air (http://www.numismaticnews.net/article/medals-of-fidem-breaths-of-fresh-creative-air)

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