THE JOURNAL OF NECROMANTIC NUMISMATICS

The Journal of Necromantic Numismatics (JNN) was a newsletter of sorts that was subscription based, but not in the conventional sense of subscription. In order to receive a copy you were invited to submit a ONE page article towards the creation of that issue, no article... no issue. This was devised by Bill Kuethe and was intended to be a quarterly produced item.

The first year only three issues were released (growing period) then it settled into quarterly for the next 4 years. then in the 6th year 2 issues were produced and then only one issue each of the next 6 years that followed. Bill would get the articles mailed to him. He would make copies of all the articles, add a front and back cover, staple all the pages together and then mail the copies to each of the contributing "subscribers". There are only a microscopic number of complete files in existence due to Kuethe's novel distribution model for the journal.

Only one person that I am aware of has the entire 32 issues besides myself and that set is Bill Kuethe's personal copies that are in The International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, which is in Las Vegas and owned by David Copperfield.

I removed the 50+ year old staples from my issues in order to be able to properly scan them all and when I finished I didn't want to attempt to slide staples through the original holes so each of the 482 pages are in top load document protectors and stored in the leather binders (with box sleeves) that I made to store them in.

A LOT of the original pages were extremely unclear since they were created in Bill's house using a 1960's copy machine which was definitely NOT made by Xerox. I thought that sharing unreadable documents would not be useful so I cleaned the pages up the best I could (I AM NOT a graphic designer nor clerk typist) and that's how I posted them to my website.

Here's a little side by side comparison of a page before and after I made my edits.

I put my set together by making trades and purchases of a couple of issues here and a few there and 12 were previously in the Leslie Cole collection that was purchased by David Copperfield and I traded magic tokens that he didn't have in his collection for the issues since he already has the Kuethe complete file. That trade involved a LOT of tokens...

I've checked with other contributing subscribers to the JNN but none of them have a complete file set and none of them are willing to part with the issues that they do have.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
NEW BOOK: MAGIC TOKENS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v24/esylum_v24n18a04.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web