LOOSE CHANGE: AUGUST 16, 2020

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V23 2020 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 23, Number 33, August 16, 2020, Article 33

Here are some additional items in the media this week that may be of interest. -Editor

This is why the hobby needs to support real reporters at real subscription-based publications like Coin World (and not just rely on free internet newsletters like, well, The E-Sylum. Paul Gilkes published an article August 14, 2020 with the results of an investigation into the background of the U.S. Mint's coin colorization feature. Nice work! -Editor

After six months of being stonewalled by the U.S. Mint and the filing of a Freedom of Information Act inquiry, Coin World is finally able to identify the vendor contracted to colorize the reverses of a limited number of 2020 Basketball Hall of Fame commemorative half dollars and dollars, as well as some details of the colorization process itself.

The Mint contract, with a maximum potential value of $8,375,000 was awarded Oct. 9, 2019, to LulaRose, a division of The Clancy Group Corp. in Winchester, Massachusetts.

The contract covers the colorization of specific design elements on the common reverse of the Proof 2020-S copper-nickel-clad half dollar struck at the San Francisco Mint and the Proof 2020-P silver dollar struck at the Philadelphia Mint.

An American Numismatic Society Pocket Change blog article by Jesse Kraft earlier this month discusses counterfeiter Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio. -Editor

Louis “The Coin” Colavecchio passed away in early July at the age of 78. With a nickname like “The Coin,” one would think that most numismatists would have heard of him, though that’s likely not the case. As it turns out, Colavecchio might be considered one of the worst nightmares for a numismatist. He was a counterfeiter, and a good one too—the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest counterfeiter.” He had been released from Butner Federal Prison in North Carolina just weeks before he passed away in hospice care, suffering from a variety of medical conditions including dementia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension. Though sentenced to 15 months in prison for producing counterfeit $100 bills in August 2019, he had only served eight of those months. United States District Court Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. agreed to free him on the time he had served in May, as a last gesture of compassion before his impending death.

This time, he was easy to prosecute. He had been bragging to an informant that he could effortlessly counterfeit $100 bills and was capable of besting even the latest security features. In December 2018, the Secret Service raided his home in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and found presses able to produce counterfeit bills that accurately simulated the real deal (including their distinct reaction to ultraviolet light), as well as 2,400 counterfeit $100 bills. Having the damning conversations on recording, he had no choice but to plead guilty. But, this wasn’t the first time he was ever caught.

Moving on the the good guys, here's a New York Times obituary for Jay Galst, who passed away in April. We'd covered this in our April 12, 2020 issue. -Editor

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

When Dr. Jay M. Galst was a boy in Milwaukee, his father, who owned a grocery, would bring home coins from the day’s receipts, and young Jay would enjoy searching through them for wheat pennies, buffalo nickels and other distinctive finds.

That boy grew up to be an ophthalmologist, and in a happy merging of vocation and avocation, he developed a passion for numismatics that included a singular area of expertise: He may have known more than anyone about coins, tokens, medals and similar artifacts that were in some way related to the eye.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
JAY M. GALST (1950-2020) (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n15a12.html)

While looking for other things I discovered this 2017 Atlantic article about a DNA analysis of the York Gospels. What tales our coin books could tell! -Editor

The York Gospels were assembled more than a thousand years ago. Bound in leather, illustrated, and illuminated, the book contains the four gospels of the Bible as well as land records and oaths taken by clergymen who read, rubbed, and kissed its pages over centuries. The Archbishops of York still swear their oaths on this book.

The York Gospels are also, quite literally, a bunch of old cow and sheep skins. Skin has DNA, and DNA has its own story to tell.

A group of archaeologists and geneticists in the United Kingdom have now analyzed the remarkably rich DNA reservoir of the York Gospels. They found DNA from humans who swore oaths on its pages and from bacteria likely originating on the hands and mouths of those humans. Best of all though, they found 1,000-year-old DNA from the cows and sheep whose skin became the parchment on which the book is written.