Thanks for sharing this, Steve! I'm curious & will keep an eye on it. I've haven't published anything numismatic (in sociology, the
field I studied, I've done academic journal articles, book chapters, etc.), but I watch out for places to read and possibly publish minor "research notes" (stuff not suitable as full articles for peer reviewed journals, but
still potentially worth contributing to the literature).
"Academia Letters" (by Academia.edu) has been putting out some numismatic stuff too (I'm aware of the ones in Academia Letters only because they send me the requests to review; I only do the free
membership, so I can read whatever's there, but I can't do the "advanced
search"). Info:
https://www.academia.edu/letters/about.
Of course, Academia.edu has tons of numismatic material unrelated to "Letters" (researchgate.net is similar but fewer members/less material, I think), ranging from very high
quality to less-than-useful, but most pretty
good including most of the independent/unpublished stuff I've come across (journal articles, book chapters, sometimes theses/dissertations, even some lectures that have been video recorded or just the PowerPoint slides, independent researchers' own e-books or unpublished essays, and so on). I keep a list of numismatists with Academia.edu pages that include .pdfs of their writings (it includes some
Forum members). Basically anytime I
search for an article and find it on Academia, I save the URL and that of the author(s), for reference. Happy to share if anyone's interested, but it's also straightforward to do the same thing oneself.
Too bad "
Journal of Ancient Numismatics" (among others) didn't take off. Opportunities for publishing online have replaced a lot of older venues, of course. But I really enjoyed the old genre of
auction catalogs with scholarly essays and other material published by "trade" entities (partly for their own commercial reasons, no doubt, but also, oftentimes, as contributions to the literature in their own right). Classical Numismatic Review and other outlets
still do a
bit of it. But I feel the genre hasn't been adequately replaced. Call me crazy, but I'm optimistic that there'll be an audience whenever someone tries it again.
Ed, regarding the Simon
Bendall Collection(s):
Simon
Bendall’s (1937-2019)
collection was burglarized
TWICE, once in 1989 (Los Angeles, while working with
NFA) and again in 2018 (
London). (I don't have any thorough summary or
contemporary accounts of the first burglary in 1989; please share if anyone knows one.)
Copy/pasting below with some edits from my "Crimes against
Numismatics" file:
According to DOAKS (
link):
His collection was stolen in 1989 when he was working with NFA. He recovered a part, which he sold to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1999, and which makes up the core of E. Lianta’s Late Byzantine Coins 1204–1453 in the Ashmolean Museum University of Oxford (2009). His recent acquisitions were also stolen from his London residence in 2018.
The second case (2018) was
still active as of 2021 October 26 (Evening
Standard):
Article Link. Dominik Kuzio was convicted in absentia (he's a fugitive believed to be in
Poland) and sentenced to 4 years in prison. He fled while awaiting trial. No coins recovered.
There was a roughly-contemporary
Forum discussion on the 2018 burglary, quoting the original Coinsweekly announcement and linking to news coverage:
https://www.forumancientcoins.com/board/index.php?topic=114662.0. The
thread also mentions the 1989 burglary of
his Palaeologian
collection and states that 20%
had been recovered, but without further sources. (And
here, another for
his death.)
Speaking of
collection burglaries, the case of J Hewitt Judd (famous US Patterns coll./author) is an interesting one. Notice what
Berk has to say about it in
Gemini XII, 509 (also BBS 189) when they came across the stolen
collection in trade decades later:
"Ex Harlan J. Berk Ltd., List No. 1, April 1974, lot 83 (cover coin). Ex Dr. J. Hewitt T. Judd Collection, 1950s
This coin was purchased by the famous author of the U.S. Pattern book, Dr. Hewett T. Judd of Wichita, Kansas, in the 1950s. In the 1960s theives [sic] broke into his house hoping to steal his U.S. pattern collection, instead they took his ancient coins. These were then kept in the home of a Mafia member for at least a decade. When they came into the market in about 1970 they were quickly identified as the stolen coins of Dr. Judd. When we brought the coins years later to show them to Dr. Judd, then a man in his mid-80s, he said with a twinkle in his eye that these were not his coins. Of course the insurance company had already paid him a princely sum for his stolen collection."
There are several different ways to read in between the lines there....
