As many of you have noticed in the recent ad for the upcoming Kolbe & Fanning sale, I'm selling much of my collection of newspapers containing articles relating to numismatics. I'll miss having them, but I'm sure they'll go to good homes. Dave Fanning did a great job of cataloging them, and at my request he provided a few examples for The E-Sylum.

I collected most of these over about a twelve-year period beginning around 1985. Those were the pre-Internet days, and I had gotten onto the mailing lists of multiple dealers who handled these. In those days libraries were on a deacquisition binge, selling off tons of newspaper holdings that had been converted to microfilm.

Bad idea in my opinion, but their loss was the collector's gain. The dealers combed the papers for interesting articles on topics of interest to public. I was an eager buyer for newspaper issues containing one or more articles on numismatic topics. I didn't buy everything that came my way, or my house would have filled to the rafters. But I chose what I thought were particularly interesting or significant numismatic topics. Here are a few representative examples.

Lot 324: A 1794 Account of the 1794 Dollars

Everybody's a critic. But who wouldn't want to be handed a brand-spanking new 1794 Dollar today?

Lot 345: Foundation Stone of the Mint

OK, raise your hands - who would like to get their mitts on THAT Time Capsule? I asked Len Augsburger (co-author with Joel Orosz of the upcoming book on Frank Stewart and the First Philadelphia Mint), who writes: "We had the following in our book (below). Looks like the Indiana newspaper picked up the account from the Philadelphia papers. So far as I know, none of the O'Brien coins are attributed today. A search of the Chapman catalogs c. 1903-1904 might reveal something."

Lot 361: A Coin Lunatic

I'm hoping that the winner of this lot will write the article on Dr. Spier that I always wanted to pen for The Asylum but never quite got around to doing. Somewhere in my library I've got a catalog of his collection. He was an interesting early California collector who's fairly unknown today but was known far and wide in his day.

To view the complete Kolbe & Fanning catalog online, see:Auction Sale One Hundred Nineteen(www.numislit.com/Sale%20119/SALE%20119.pdf)