ABOUT THIS ISSUE: SEPTEMBER 7, 2025

Monday being a holiday here in the U.S. gave me a chance for an early start on this week's issue. I worked on Notes from E-Sylum Readers and forwarded some articles for Garrett to work on before heading across the street to our neighborhood picnic.

While working on the issue this afternoon I took time out to host a visitor - contributor Greg Bennick was in town on his way to Dulles Airport and he stopped in for a quick visit. We had a great time looking at books on errors and counterstamps, and he had with him a counterstamped colonial coin that came from the auction of my collection in 2006. We also looked at remainders from my American Journal of Numismatics hoard and works by J.S.G. Boggs. We had such fun in a short time that we forgot to take a photo to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps another time.

We've had discussions recently about artificial intelligence in numismatics. The big news this week is Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement over its use of pirated books in its training data. The settlements amount to about $3,000 per book. That's a victory for the authors in that suit, but the interesting part will be what happens next. AI companies have shown some willingness to pay certain publishers for use of their copyrighted products, but the bar is pretty high. One development to watch could be Cloudflare's gatekeeper tools that enable a for websites and AI companies to negotiate licensing and payment agreements. Here are some related articles.

Anthropic Agrees to Pay Authors at Least $1.5 Billion in AI Copyright Settlement (https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-settlement-lawsuit-copyright/)
Cloudflare is arming content creators with free weapons in the battle against AI bot crawlers (https://fortune.com/2024/09/23/ai-bot-crawlers-cloudflare-content-creators/)

Finally, here are some interesting non-numismatic history articles I came across this week. The first two are from Jack El-Hai's Damn History newsletter.

The Early Modern Camera Obscura (https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-early-modern-camera-obscura/)
Everyone Had A Feather Bed (https://birdhistory.substack.com/p/everyone-had-a-feather-bed-da4)

And a cocktail party question: can you name the only two countries in the world with an X in their name? -Editor

Wayne Homren
Wayne Homren is the founding editor of The E-Sylum and a consultant for the Newman Numismatic Portal. His collecting interests at various times included U.S. Encased Postage Stamps, merchant counterstamps, Pittsburgh Obsolete paper money, Civil War tokens and scrip, Carnegie Hero Medals, charge coins and numismatic literature. He also collects and has given presentations on the work of Money Artist J.S.G. Boggs. In the non-numismatic world he's worked in artificial intelligence, data science, and as a Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Defense.

Garrett Ziss
Garrett Ziss is a numismatic collector and researcher, with a focus on American paper money and early U.S. silver and copper coins. He is also a part-time U.S. coin cataloger for Heritage Auctions. Garrett assists Editor Wayne Homren by editing and formatting a selection of articles and images each week. When he's not engaged in numismatics, Garrett is pursuing a Master's Degree in Quantitative Economics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Pete Smith
Numismatic researcher and author Pete Smith of Minnesota has written about early American coppers, Vermont coinage, numismatic literature, tokens and medals, the history of the U.S. Mint and much more. Author of American Numismatic Biographies, he contributes original articles to The E-Sylum often highlighting interesting figures in American numismatic history.

Greg Bennick
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

John Nebel
Numismatist, photographer, and ANS Board member and Fellow John Nebel of Boulder, CO helped the ANA and other clubs like NBS get online in the early days of the internet, hosting websites gratis through his Computer Systems Design Co. To this day he hosts some 50 ANA member club sites along with our coinbooks.org site, making the club and our E-Sylum archive available to collectors and researchers worldwide.

Bruce Perdue
Encased coinage collector (encasedcoins.info) Bruce Perdue of Aurora, Illinois has been the volunteer NBS webmaster from its early days and works each week to add the latest E-Sylum issue to our archive and send out the email announcement.