I would like to make a couple of corrections to Frank Draskovic's interesting piece last week about coin postcards.

First, the original publisher of the "H.S.M." type of cambist cards was Hugo Semmler of Magdeburg. His name and city appeared on the earliest of his cards (see upper left corner of accompanying illustration). For some unknown reason, Semmler later replaced his name and city with the initials H. S. M. (for Hugo Semmler, Magdeburg). The reason may have been so that Semmler could license his postcards to other distributors and jobbers; the later cards indicate that they were made in Bavaria as well as in Saxony. A later version of the same post card is also illustrated, showing these initials. Draskovic is correct in dating the earliest of the Semmler cards to the year 1904. One of his cards in my collection is postmarked 25 April 1904, the earliest postmark seen thus far.

(Coin postcards, embossed as well as surface printed, were made before 1904, but were not of the cambist variety showing currency exchange rates. One such is a New Year's greeting card made by Paul Suess of Dresden with embossed 2 and 20 mark German coins, postmarked 31 December 1900. Another has images of Switzerland's first silver coins of 1850 and later, made by L. Meyer of Canton Luzern and postmarked 5 March 1900.)

Second, the album in which Mr. Draskovic's collection is housed is not a "Bluemel" album. It is one that was sold by Fortuna Hornung, proprietor of a stationery store in Vienna, as the detail showing her label indicates. The address on the label is an earlier location of her store, Josefstaedterstrasse 58. A few years later she had moved to No. 82 on that street, and by 1914 the store was being used as the address of Alfred Josef Bluemel (see illustration of his postcard album with 1914 date). By that time Semmler's business had been succeeded by a Berlin publisher, Max Heimbrecht.

I hope these postcards could become a project for E-Sylum readers. What little I know about them was written up in our print journal, The Asylum, several years ago (Spring 2005 and 2006 #1).

Don Kolkman writes:

Don adds:

To view the eBay postcard lots, see:35 results found for Geld / Muenzkarte

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:BLUMEL COIN CARD POSTCARD ALBUM CENSUS(www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n02a29.html)