Exonumia/medals folks - Here's your chance to voice how a book is organized
tmot99
Posts: 5,238 ✭✭✭
Ok, as many of you know, I'm working on a new Columbian Expo medal/token book. I'll be using a lot of Eglit material for this, but that reference is highly unorganized.
Here's what's in the plan:
Organization by size.
Store Cards seperate
Elongates seperate
Paper stuff moved to the back - no new additions - they don't belong in this reference anyway but want to keep the Eglit listings in tact.
Each listing will, to the best of my ability to obtain, weight, diameter, thickness, "See other", cross references, and medal/coin alignment.
If a medal/token has different metal varieties, it will be given a qualifier for metal. That will allow future additions to use letters.
Like metals will be grouped together.
If you've got other ideas, let me hear them. I'm getting close to doing the reorganization and don't want to have to do it 2,3 or 4 times as I hear other good options. I am fairly confident that I won't be able to satisfy everybody, but I'm going to try to please as many as possible with being able to find things as easily as possible.
Here's what's in the plan:
Organization by size.
Store Cards seperate
Elongates seperate
Paper stuff moved to the back - no new additions - they don't belong in this reference anyway but want to keep the Eglit listings in tact.
Each listing will, to the best of my ability to obtain, weight, diameter, thickness, "See other", cross references, and medal/coin alignment.
If a medal/token has different metal varieties, it will be given a qualifier for metal. That will allow future additions to use letters.
Like metals will be grouped together.
If you've got other ideas, let me hear them. I'm getting close to doing the reorganization and don't want to have to do it 2,3 or 4 times as I hear other good options. I am fairly confident that I won't be able to satisfy everybody, but I'm going to try to please as many as possible with being able to find things as easily as possible.
0
Comments
Glad you are doing an update to Eglit. Thank you!
Suggestions:
1) A quick identifier in the front of the book using images, similar to Krause's world coin finder. This will allow a novice to scan 5 or 6 pages instead of 200 pages to find their item.
2) An expanded and quality-verified index in the back.
3) Regarding the weights and diameters, it would be interesting to have 3 or 4 sets of measurements from recent auction appearances. Unfortunately, Columbian Expo material is rarely given the attention it deserves and such emperical data is often ignored by catalogers.
4) If you have the tokens/medals available, perhaps include thicknesses for each medal/token, where relevant.
<< <i>Glad you are doing an update to Eglit. Thank you! Suggestions: 1) A quick identifier in the front of the book using images, similar to Krause's world coin finder. This will allow a novice to scan 5 or 6 pages instead of 200 pages to find their item. 2) An expanded and quality-verified index in the back. 3) Regarding the weights and diameters, it would be interesting to have 3 or 4 sets of measurements from recent auction appearances. Unfortunately, Columbian Expo material is rarely given the attention it deserves and such emperical data is often ignored by catalogers. 4) If you have the tokens/medals available, perhaps include thicknesses for each medal/token, where relevant. >>
I hadn't thought about the identifier in the front, but plan to put a lot of words and phrases from the medal into the index. Pick a word or phrase and you should be able to find the medal/medals quickly. The index will be MUCH better. I hate Eglits. I'll look into the weights and measures from other appearences. I had planned to make a comment, probably in the intro, that all weights and measures are approximate as I've seen WIDE variences in thicknesses. I was looking at the original roll of HK-222s (E-51A) in aluminum, and thickness were all over the place. Some were double that of other pieces.
I was looking at the original roll of HK-222s (E-51A) in aluminum, and thickness were all over the place. Some were double that of other pieces.
I agree that physical measurements vary, but the fact that some of the 222s were double that of other pieces is amazing. I can only visualize a sheet of aluminum that was very poorly rolled, then fed through a blanking station. Were the strikes consistent, or were the thick pieces more well struck in terms of detail?
A range of weights and diameters for each issue would be optimal, but the amount of labor to obtain that information would not be practical, unless you assembled a team of people and broke the work down into managable groups.
The diameters of most that I've measured are all pretty close unless they've been worn down a lot. In that case, those don't even count. There are 0.05mm differences in some cases but to me, that's not relavent. Putting together real measured ranges would just not be pratical. Too many of the issues are rare to extremely rare and just finding a second example would be very hard not to mention just finding the first.
I think this is much more important than you may think. No matter how good or accurate your descriptions are, there is nothing better than a visual representation. Each collector will notice different things and with a picture to choose from, it eliminates any need to come up with descriptors that all collectors can understand.
Depending on how thorough an update of Eglit you are doing, you may even consider, along with your reorganization, to renumber the entire series. Of course this is only neccessary if there are a major amount of changes that would create a cumbersome listing of the current numbering system.
Now before everyone starts the witch hunt for that comment, this is not sacrilege. Keep in mind that this has been done in many other series across the years. All that is required is a one page conversion table comparing the older numbering system to the new.
As to varied thicknessess, if it is not a major amount of difference I see no reason to mention more than the "thickness varies" for a particular example.
QN
Go to Early United States Coins - to order the New "Early United States Half Dollar Vol. 1 / 1794-1807" book or the 1st new Bust Quarter book!
Good luck with your quest and the above suggestions all make sense in my mind.
<< <i>ttt for the night crowd >>
thanks, i would have missed it.
Thicknesses in mm
2.69
2.47
2.71
3.26
You can see why the difference. On the thinner piece, it looks as if the edge of the rim was tapered. Not sure if this was the original planchet that way or if it happened later, but the thicker one doesn't have that.
On the thinner piece, it looks as if the edge of the rim was tapered. Not sure if this was the original planchet that way or if it happened later, but the thicker one doesn't have that.
Very interesting. I have noticed a similar phenomenon on other issues, but not to the extent of your example. If you were to apply weights to each of the four examples you listed, that would give us a better idea if the thickness is the result of two different die set-ups, or if the planchets did vary greatly.
BTW, where does one obtain an "original roll of HK-222s?" What does the roll container look like? Very neat stuff.
As I stated earlier, just state that there are varying thicknessess and maybe show the side by side picture to illustrate the differences.
QN
Go to Early United States Coins - to order the New "Early United States Half Dollar Vol. 1 / 1794-1807" book or the 1st new Bust Quarter book!
The ideas listed above sound good .. will all the HK's be republished in the Exposition book ?
take care ! ... tj
"many contacts among the Lumberjacks "
NGC Registry AOEDAD sets:
Set #1 Major Expositions
Set #2 So-called Dollar Collections
So-called $50 Slug Facsimiles
Bashlow re-strikes
<< <i>Great that you are coming out with the book .. this will give me a pair of Hoffman bookends for my Numismatic library. The ideas listed above sound good .. will all the HK's be republished in the Exposition book ? take care ! ... tj >>
Of course, and then some! There's a lot more to be added to the HK book as we all know. We just felt the need to regroup them, renumber them, or something before adding 100s more medals.