I must congratulate you both for your chosen collecting topic of Society of Medallists and your desire to complete this series you mentioned in last week's E-Sylum. Also your wish to put together a collection of Joe Levine's auction catalogs.

Joe's catalogs (Presidential Coin & Antique) are extremely useful and will be more so in the future. I have indexed all of Joe's sales from #42 (June 1987) to date by citing each medal (sale and lot number) to the respective artist in my American Artist Databank (now over 2,800 pages in length and growing daily). I plan to put this on the internet in 2010, so you will have the opportunity to look up any American medal (whose artist or maker is known) to learn his brief biography, all the coins, medals and similar items the artist created, plus an extensive bibliography for that artist. Also recent auction sales, and the public collections where that piece is located (for a dozen museums) and where the piece has been illustrated.

Formerly I did this indexing by marking up one of Joe's catalogs. (Now I find it more accurate to photocopy each page and mark up the photocopy.) Thus it was my goal to have a double set of Joe's catalogs (to keep one pristine!). I only accomplished this by buying a run of Joe's catalogs in the Arlie Slabaugh library sale and paying a premium $600. And this did not contain the first 11 issues (which I subsequently obtained).

Heath, I hope you can obtain your set for less than what I had to pay, but as you surmised, you will find they are invaluable for the information, attributions and sheer collector lore they contain. Joe does an outstanding job in the preparation of his catalogs. This is even more incredible when you consider Joe is a one-man operation!

Heath replied:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:SUBSCRIBER PROFILE: HEATH MACALPINE(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v13n22a17.html)