Wayne Homren

Among our new subscribers this week areMitch Mitchell, Paul Cartmill, Chris Freeman, K. E. Sims, Phil Kurjan, And Philip Blette.Welcome aboard! We now have 1,299 subscribers.

Welcome to the Future. It's 2010 - so where's my jet-pack and personal robot assistant? Seriously, though, if anyone had told me in say, 1990 that by 2010 I'd be editing a gazillion pages of numismatic content weekly I'd have looked at them like they had three heads. But I *do* have a robot army of sorts, in the various computer productivity tools that have emerged.

First is the personal computer itself, followed by the Internet. Put them together and one person can publish content to thousands of subscribers and the whole damn world with the click of a mouse. Sure beats the old days of laying out pages by hand, taking a master copy to a printer, stuffing envelopes and schlepping to the post office.

Other tools like our Flickr image archive make editing and publishing photos a snap. And having the world's newspapers online and searchable instantly gives me an army of reporters and photographers to draw from. Not to mention our readers, all available to me via email from everywhere in the world, which constitute the best collection of numismatic talent anywhere.

Combine this with the news from Amazon that on Christmas, the company sold more Kindle books than physical books, and I guess, just maybe, The Future has arrived.

This week we open with Florida travel plans and MULTIPLE great book reviews.Other topics include the Schulman coin dealer family and the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, coin replicas of Peter Rosa and Neal Sherman, medals honoring Joseph Wharton, and more.

To learn about Parisian royal agricultural society attendance medals, coin flipping in Roman times, and a million-dollar U.S. banknote, read on.

Wayne Homren
Numismatic Bibliomania Society