LOOSE CHANGE: JULY 19, 2026

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V29 2026 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 29, Number 29, 2026, Article 27

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

We recently discussed the new Museum of American Finance in Boston. While the Museum of Money in Dallas does have a little to do with history and numismatics, it is mainly a fun interactive experience for visitors. Check it out, and let us know what you think. Found via News & Notes from the Society of Paper Money Collectors (Volume XI, Number 50, May 26, 2026). -Editor

Some of it is pure spectacle. There is a booth where dollar bills shower down on whoever steps inside. There is a vault visitors can attempt to break into by dodging a laser grid. There is an 80s investment banker who reads guests' financial futures with great confidence and questionable accuracy.

Other exhibits are quieter and more curious. One small room asks visitors to barter their way to what they need without any money at all. Most adults give up within a couple of minutes and rediscover why people invented currency. Another lines a wall with real and counterfeit bills and asks visitors to pick out the fakes. A third tells the story of Mademoiselle Zélie, a 19th-century French singer who was paid for a Pacific island tour in livestock and produce: three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, five thousand coconuts, and fifteen hundred oranges, among other things.

Tucked between the photo ops are panels on the real history of money. Bronze knife-shaped and spade-shaped Chinese coins from 2,700 years ago. The story of Y'all Street, the Texas stock exchange opening in Dallas. Why gold became valuable in the first place (it doesn't rust, it's rare, and it's easy to shape).

To read the complete article, see:
The Museum of Money (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/momoney-the-museum-of-money)

The Greysheet published a remembrance of former Whitman Publishing Co. owner Charles Anderson. Here's an excerpt - see the complete article online. -Editor

A lifelong resident of Florence, Alabama, Mr. Anderson combined the aspects acquired as a youth with lessons learned through life to incorporate into a successful business empire. As a youth, he held numerous jobs that included working at his father's newsstand, delivering newspapers and running a fireworks stand. He graduated from Florence State Teachers College (now University of North Alabama), earning a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in marketing and a minor in economics.

His interest in numismatics began at the age of 9 in 1943 when he was given a 1921 Alabama 2x2 commemorative half dollar. As an adult, he and his brother Joel established ANCO Collector Supplies, a manufacturer of coin tubes and distributor of many accessories for the coin trade. ANCO purchased H.E. Harris Co., adding coin items to the company's stamp business. Under Anderson's leadership, H.E. Harris Co. purchased Whitman Publishing Co. in 2003.

In the numismatic world, he served as president of the Alabama Numismatic Association, was a life member of the American Numismatic Association. He served as a trustee with the American Numismatic Society and received an honorary Life Fellowship from the organization in 2023. In 2024, he was recognized by COINAge as one of the "Numismatists of the Century."

In February 1660 a metalworker was tried at the Old Bailey, London on the charge of producing false foreign coinage. This was a less serious offence than counterfeiting coin of the realm, for which the penalty was death. While the metalworker's evidence cannot be regarded as entirely trustworthy, since he naturally sought to avoid implicating himself, what emerges from these legal proceedings is an unusual glimpse into a criminal underworld. In particular, a scheme by a London goldsmith called Thomas Violet to extort money from certain Jewish merchants. Violet's plan was to entice these traders into buying a great quantity of illicit foreign coins. Then, having informed the authorities, he would catch them red-handed. It was a fiendish trap set by a man with a name ‘too sweet for so foul a carcass'. A trap, what is more, that reaffirmed prejudiced beliefs about Jewish criminality, particularly that Jews were guilty of counterfeiting and clipping coins.

In "This Week in Literary History" from the Literary Hub, short story king O. Henry was released from prison. -Editor

Famously, O. Henry (the pen name of William Sydney Porter), author of "The Gift of the Magi," and one of the most celebrated short story writers of his generation, and whose legacy is celebrated every year by the O. Henry Prize for Fiction, got his start in prison, while serving time for embezzling funds from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas, where he had worked as a teller. ?

It's possible that Porter shouldn't have been convicted at all: a 1916 report characterized the bank in question as "carelessly managed," and revealed that "the patrons used to enter, go behind the counter, take out one hundred or two hundred dollars and say a week later, ‘Porter, I took out $200, last week. See if I left a memorandum of it. I meant to.'" The Times report claims that Porter, who by the time he was charged had moved to Houston and taken a job as a columnist with The Daily Post, resigned before one of the "misappropriations with which he was charged," and that if he had simply gone back to Austin when he was summoned to stand trial, he would have been acquitted.

The literary world should be grateful for his poor luck, because it was in prison that Porter "did his first serious literary work," as the Times put it. In order to be able to send money home to support his daughter Margaret, he wrote and published 14 short stories, under pen names, including the one with which he would become famous: O. Henry. ?

Porter was released early for good behavior, on July 24, 1901, and returned to Pittsburgh to live with his daughter and his in-laws, before moving on to New York City.

As collectors, we all appreciate stories of nice finds. Here's a story about a 19-year-old who discovered a Wilt Chamberlain warm-up jacket from the 1972 NBA finals at a thrift store. -Editor

Quinn has sold nearly 10,000 items over the past four years, and he's learned how to decode things. (The three T-shirts were black, extra-large and looked like they'd been owned by a meticulous heavy metal fan.) But the one mystery he hadn't yet solved was the one everyone wanted to talk about. How had a Wilt Chamberlain warmup jacket from the 1972 NBA finals ended up in a suburban thrift store? And how had a teenager — a young man whose mom wasn't even alive when Chamberlain wore it — snagged something so special?

Quinn might never know the answer to the first question, but the second felt clearer. What seemed to most people like luck had required a mix of time and community, family and another boy's split-second decision.

Sometimes good things slip through a person's fingers. Sometimes someone else — a teenager, perhaps, with a good eye and $3 — might pluck that good thing from the garbage and grab a little bit of history.