The 2026 World’s Fair of Money

For the first time since 2019, I attended the annual summer convention of the American Numismatic Association, branded as The World’s Fair of Money®. (The late winter convention is the National Money Show®.) This year the WFM was held in Pittsburgh. Having been away from the hobby for several years, I went only to renew or discover  friendships and I did not deliver a presentation though I judged Literature exhibits. The Literature category had three entrants: The Works of David R. Sear, Selected Banknote Reporters, and Selected Works of Charles Trissler Steigerwalt.

I attended the judges orientation on Tuesday and started rating the exhibits that afternoon. With me was my host in Pittsburgh, a lifelong printer and typesetter. We read the exhibits and talked about them that afternoon and into the evening. When I returned to the convention Wednesday morning, I reviewed my work. In my opinion, all of the Literature exhibits had problems that prevented any of them from a clear first place award. 

First place went to The Works of David R. Sear. The ten display cases held nice, newish copies of the editions of his books. All of the books were closed. Not presented were page proofs, mark-ups, or manuscripts. Nothing was said about content added or deleted across editions. The need to change prices was mentioned but without explanations of cause, only a tautologous statement that rising prices caused prices to change necessitating a new edition.

Historian Dennis Boggs
www.meetmrlincoln.com

Cards around the volumes carried lines and paragraphs about Sear and how he became the leading author of these catalog price guides for Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins. In my opinion, the best thing about the exhibit was the typesetting on the note cards which were mounted on foam-core panels. 

After I turned in my judging forms, I was free to explore the convention and meet people. With my reporter’s notebook in hand, I introduced myself with my business card, saying that I would be writing about the convention for both online and print media. 

Near the center of the floor, opposite the U.S. Mint, the four representatives of Goldback did not go on record or talk to me and insisted that only the CEO or publicity manager was authorized to speak for the company and no one went on record because they were unauthorized to say that their pricing information is proprietary and not for public release. However, Goldback issued demonstration notes for the convention and those were giveaways on the floor. 

Some of the recent issues of T&S Coins of Vilnius.

T&S Coin of Vilnius was also on the Promenade at booth 1033.  Their representative, Julija Markauskienė, sat down with me to outline their business model and marketing. T&S Coin (https://www.ts-coin.com) specializes in high-relief silver celebrations, limited to 500 pieces per design. The newest products are 2-ounce coins. Many series are colorized. The premium product is sold wholesale to dealers who have pre-positioned customers for these memorials to pirates, samurai, Amazons, elves, the Knights Templar, and very many other popular themes. Coins denominated in dollars have been issued for Liberia and Niue. For Cameroun, the denominations have been in francs. 

Julija Markauskienė greets a customer.

Julija Markauskienė told me that their issues are usually 95% sold out when released. As a result, she said, there is an active secondary market. She told me that their sales break out into roughly one-third each in Europe, Asia, and North America.  

Vintage Collectibles Group (Florida) and Omaha Collectibles Group (Nebraska) are the banners for Matthew Brotherton of Knoxville, Tennessee. A graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law, Matt came to numismatics because his father was a collector. He told me that he loves history and loves to travel. 

It was nice to stop by and chat with Jonathan K. Kern of Lexington, Kentucky. Long ago, he helped me acquire an ancient Greek coin for my collection, “Towns and Times of Philosophers.” Our children are about the same age. In addition to ancients, Kern works with US federal and related coinage, and he is a PCGS-authorized dealer for direct grading submittals. 

My introduction to numismatics came from Liberty Coin Service of Lansing, Michigan. Back in 1972, the owner, Bill Bradford, and I sat on a curb outside the East Lansing State Bank where he had a box. A few weeks later, he had a counter in a jewelry store. The next year he had the whole store. Ten years later, an admirer of H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercury, he retired from numismatics to start Liberty magazine, selling the store to Pat Heller. Nominally, Pat retired a few years ago, but he was at the show. I met him at the Exhibits on  Tuesday afternoon, and he was at the LCS booth the next day. 

Tyrants of the Golden Horn is a museum experience. The traveling exhibit is called the world’s most valuable private collection. It embraces “tyrants” from the Tigris to the Thames by displaying the highest quality examples of their most valuable circulating coins, such as the gold solidus of Constantinople. From the first Roman coins struck there to the first modern issues of Turkey, they say that their hallways offer a complete inventory of rulers. Find their website at https://www.thetyrantcollection.com/the-collection/

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Numismatic Truthseekers 

I Took My Change in Baybucks 

Numismatics: The Standard of Proof in Economics 

The Future of Money 

Numismatics: History as Market 

Waves Passing in the Night

In the history of astronomy, there was a conjecture in the 1760s that the planets orbit the sun in distances that can be described by a simple rule: 

Raise 2 to the power of the planet in sequence:

Multiply that by 3.

To that product add 4.

Divide that sum by 10. 

You get a measurement in “astronomical units” i.e., Earth-distances. And it is almost correct. After Mars, before Jupiter, there needs to be a planet Number 5. Then Jupiter is 6 and Saturn 7. Seeking Planet 5 led to the discovery first of Ceres in 1801, then Pallas (1802), Vesta (1807), and so on; and we are still finding asteroids in that gap. 

Today, the “Titius-Bode Conjecture” is ignored by serious astronomers. It is accepted as an accident of algebra that any small distribution can be described by some formula of arbitrary simplicity. 

Waves Passing in the Night:
Walter Murch in the Land of the
Astrophysicists; Bloomsbury, 2017.

Walter Murch found it compelling. Murch is a musician. He was born in 1943; his family was literate, artistic, and economically comfortable. Young Murch was fascinated by sound and by age 12 he had his own tape recorder. Decades later, he received Academy Awards for working on Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, American Graffiti, and other films. Murch found a deep truth in the Titius-Bode Conjecture. To him, it is evidence of the Music of the Spheres: something that we perceive caused by something deeper, more subtle, that we do not. 

Murch’s biographer, Lawrence Weschler, loves his subject. Weschler is more than fair to Murch’s detractors. No serious astronomer agrees with him. They will not even read his papers to refute them. This is not about medieval geometry: Murch has extended his theory to include wave mechanics as applied to gravity. That led one scientist to ask: “Why do our interplanetary spacecraft not detect such disturbances?” It is a cogent question. 

I snagged this book from my city library’s “De-acquisitioning Bookcase.” (25 cents each, all with their library call numbers on them. What would Eratosthenes say to that?) I took it down because of the title, but it fell open to Ernst Chladni and his waves in sand on a vibrating steel plate. When I worked at the Hands-On Museum in Ann Arbor, this was a learning station in the gallery. I referred to it often when explaining fireworks in the kitchen to mixed audiences. I would say, “We can imagine electrons as little balls with minus-signs orbiting a nucleus, but it is more helpful to think of them like those standing waves of sand, as probability distributions.” 

So, the book seemed complex, over-arching, challenging, and probably wrong, but certainly interesting. And it is all of that. 

Weschler lets Murch do his own advocating. Aside from the necessary explanations, Weschler just points the reader to Murch’s website and other works. For a thin book (150 pages), it stands on eight pages of references. It seemed like a good way to get lost and if I had more time, I might follow that path. 

For now, I am happy to have reinforced my belief that the universe is not merely knowable, it is comfortable. And there is sound in space.

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

G. H. Hardy’s “Apology”

Elisha Loomis and the Pythagorean Proposition 

Imaginary Numbers are Real. Pegasus is not. 

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers