ArmadilloCon 48 (Part 1): 1000 Words

 

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ArmadilloCon 39 Arm   lloCo 0 rt 2 A         Day  1 rma.      and Day 2 Armad       n 4 Part 2          Con 4.   Da  ArmadilloC n 5   ma       dilloCon 47 Part 3

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 

Katherine Anne Porter

“She has simply an eye and an ear sharp, shrewd, and true as a tuning fork. She has given to this little story all her wit and observation, her blistering humor and her just cruelty; for she has none of that slack tolerance or sentimental tenderness toward symptomatic evils that amounts to criminal collusion between author and character.” From Katherine Anne Porter's Introduction to A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty (Doubleday, 1941) in The Collected Essays and Occasional Writings of Katherine Anne Porter (Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press, 1970).

I sought out Katherine Anne Porter because Austin science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor spoke at Kyle’s Katherine Anne Porter Literary Center (508 West Center Street, 78640) and a review in the Hays County Free Press popped up for scrolling in my Kyle email. When I read the story, I merely recognized Porter’s name, not having read her before, but was nonetheless surprised that she is considered a local Kyle author. So, I went to the library. 

I found her pleasurable. Katherine Anne Porter is good company. I love listening to her  across our distances. In addition to a dozen essays here, some several times, I also read short stories and poems in The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (Harvest/Harcourt Press, 1965, et seq). I read “Pale Horse/Pale Rider” through three times because that is what it took to understand the sequence of events. Clearly, even  though I had read several other stories ahead of that, I was not prepared for a serious engagement. Nonetheless, she was an inspiration. I could have fattened these two anthologies with post-its bearing exclamation points or quotation marks tagging the juxtapositions, the clever and insightful phrases. 

[Added 12 April 2026 8:48 PM - I checked out Ship of Fools from my local library but after about twenty pages, some even from the middle, it is going back tomorrow. She writes well. Her word portraits are cinematic. However, her sense of life is entirely negative and she only delivers a long torrent of small, spiteful insults.]

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet 

Neighborhood Book Kiosks 

When Worlds Collide

Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 

Five Books about Books

In the Library of Congress catalog system, books about books are under Z: Bibliography, Library Science, and General Information Resources. That large umbrella covers the history of books and therefore typesetting and the craft of making the media of writing and reading.

Notes from a Public Typewriter edited by Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti. Grand Central Publishing (Hachette Book Group), 2018. (UT Library Z 49 N68 2018 MAIN)

Michael and Hilary Gustafson own the Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor. Shortly after they opened in 2013, they provided their customers with a mechanical typewriter for leaving thoughts or often only words, alone or in a string. 

Google Maps view.
124 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

At first, the machine was only a display. The impetus for active use came from the first customer who asked for paper. Makes and models changed. I found the logos for Rheinmetall, Royal, and Olympia; they probably had others. One note asked, “Where is the power button?” 

Whimsical or deep, fleeting or deserving of stone, the random writings of these literati provided Laurel and me occasional minutes away from work, sitting on the living room couch. For myself, given the social context of a typewriter in a bookstore on the main street of a university town, the marriage proposals (and rejections) gave me the most to consider.

500 Years of Printing  by Frederick G. Melcher, et al. American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1940; 31 pages (6-³/₁₆ x 9-⅛). (UT Library Z 127 C5 P9 LIB SCH)

Towns across America and around the world celebrated the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg’s press. This book acknowledged the war that America was not yet formally engaged in: 

“It will often be said, especially in this year of international turmoil, that printing, like all inventions, has great power for evil as well as for good, that false ideas can be as successfully disseminated as sound ones, that disrupting propaganda can be readily put in print as constructive programs, that oppressors can as easily use the press as liberators. This has been true in all of the five centuries since printing began, yet the gains have far outweighed the harm and will continue to do so. Literacy has been extended, libraries established for the free use of books, book ownership has been made more universal and the machinery of book distribution has been bettered.” 

The eight essays deliver richly detailed history about publishing in our America. However, the first three set a foundation with the fifteenth century and Gutenberg before revealing the surviving works of the printing press in Mexico 1539. In the British colonies of North America, newspapers were preferred. After independence many more books were produced; as a consequence of both, machines evolved rapidly.

Books & Readers in Ancient Greece & Rome by Frederick G. Kenyon. Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1932. (Z 112 K38 1932 MAIN). Kenyon was the Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum. This book draws on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (from c. BCE 100 to CE 200), and other finds discovered only the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One trove came from a home in Herculaneum (79 CE). Much here is from inferences for which the earlier empirical evidence quickly becomes scanty. We know more from allusions to books in books than to actual copies. A nice touch here (and admittedly a problem) is that the quotations in Latin and Greek are not translated. 

In our common culture, proclamations on scrolls are read 

from top to bottom. In fact, a typical papyrus scroll was held 

horizontally fed from the right and unrolled to the left, two 

columns on a page (reading left to right), two pages to a sheet, 

each line about 20 characters. 

This book was intended for an American audience. All high schools taught Latin and many offered Greek. For myself, it was possible to glean a lot from cognates in Latin, though fewer popped up in Greek. I was surprised at how well I could sound out the Greek miniscules. I seem to have learned my letters over the years.

Heidi Kasa reading from
The Beginners at 
Anna's Antiques.

I had to pause at Kenyon’s prejudices. We each have our own. About the library room unearthed at a home in Herculaneum, Kenyon gives reasons for suspecting that the owner was Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher. “It is only to be regretted that the owner was not a collector of works of poetry or history, instead of a philosopher.” 

Kenyon also dislikes public performances. Authors recited in public spaces and they also rented private homes for the purpose. “It was not a healthy phase for literature, since it encouraged compositions which lent themselves to rhetorical declamation; and one may doubt whether it did any service to the circulation of books.” 

As the curator of an endowed institution, Kenyon had no feel for the paths by which words find paper and together they find readers. 

Hungarian Pioneers of Printing Arts: Mechanization of Setting by Dr. Peter Szöke. Hungarian Central Technical Library and Documentation Center, 1972. (UT Library Z 134 H9 V351 LIB SCH). Although culturally an island, Hungary benefited from the industrial revolution and independent inventors patented their solutions to the problems of typesetting. The machines here are similar to others that are known.

Literary Machines by Theodor Holm Nelson.Project Xanadu. 1980 - 1987.  (UT Library Z 52.4 N46 1987B C.2 MAIN). Ted Nelson was an early advocate and promoter of small computers. Literary Machines continued and extended the ideas presented in his oversize coffee table essay Computer Lib/Dream Machines (1974) which advocated for the popularization and democratization of computers via microcomputers (and terminals to mainframes). The extensively unstructured delivery of Literary Machines focused (for lack of a better word) on hypertext. Nelson called it that back in 1965. Today, we expect to be able to link information: data and metadata; Github and Get Info. 

• Computer Lib/Dream Machine is available on the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/computer-lib-dream-machines and 
• Literary Machines is readable here: https://archive.org/details/lm-81/LM81
• The full Ted Nelson Archive is also open for access https://archive.org/details/tednelsonarchive

Previously on Necessary Facts

Goudy by Bernard Lewis and Goudy in His Own Words. 

Frederic W. Goudy by Peter Beilenson 

Hermann Zapf on Alphabets 

Start the Presses 

For the Glory of Old Lincoln High 

Answering G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) loved to debate. Among his interlocutors at public forums were George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and H. G. Wells; he also enjoyed engaging over ideas as a recreational virtue. He wrote 80 books and 4000 newspaper columns. Today, he is best known for the Father Brown mysteries that stream on BritBox. (Originally, the books presented 51 stories in five volumes over three decades.) Chesterton supported liberal and even progressive social reforms but as a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and finally Roman Catholicism, he was essentially conservative. Therefore, Chesterton condemned science fiction as “fear of the past.”

Chesterton writing from www.chesterton.org

To me, his literary style was “confectionary.” He wrote for people who have time to enjoy reading, for whom being in your own living room in an overstuffed chair with a book or newspaper is relaxing and refreshing because it is intellectually stimulating. So, he takes a long time to make a point. There are no punchy aphorisms here.

Gilbert Keith and Frances Blogg Chesterton
from www.chesterton.org

“The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.

[…]

Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”

(“Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World, 1910. (Scanned and archived by Project Gutenberg and also Wikisource).

In those days of cold type before photo-offset, books were reset by hand.
I found a discrepancy between two printings: in this essay
the word "brave" (Cassell, London) appearing as "braver" (Dodd Mead, New York).

"The charge of the Crusades was a charge; 

it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver."

Since my first professional sale in 1973, I have written three stories, two science fiction, one horror. Fiction is hard to write because you have to create people, and their actions must make sense because their universe is understandable. It is much easier to report on what I find: pet groomers, political lobbyists, computers, restaurants, stars, coins, robots, airplanes. I take the people as I find them and usually publicize the best side of them. I also read science fiction and participate in the culture of it through ArmadilloCon here in Austin. 

Before I could read, I watched Captain Midnight on television. The first science fiction book I read was The Magic Ball From Mars by Carl L. Biemiller (Curtis Publishing, 1953; website here: https://biemiller.com/bchapt1.htm.) I was nine. As wonderful as it was in two books to meet a boy from outer space, those were stories no different than Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett. What changed was my library card. Entering the 9th grade, I traded my juvenile card for an adult card. After a few fruitless visits to the adult stacks and a last brief walk along the juvenile stacks, I asked the librarian for help. She gave me two books in one: When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. 

I knew end-of-the-world stories as matinee movies about World War III and I knew The Day the Earth Stood Still. But this was different. I could see myself in the story. If we are going to another planet with the smartest people around, I knew some girls I would like to have gone with, especially once we arrive on Bronson Beta. This was a planet with an indoor pool!  (It also had troublesome commies and fascists.) (Book and movie reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/01/when-worlds-collide.html)

Closer to this decade, I read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. They are also invented worlds where the reader can find a place. Fitzgerald and Austen are compelling. But their worlds are static, not merely unchanged but unchangeable. Elizabeth Bennett does not perceive the canals and steam engines that are reshaping her world.

Gatsby is close to science fiction but unintentionally so. The plot hinges on an automobile accident. A generation earlier it could have been a horse-drawn carriage or any other happenstance for which people refuse to accept responsibility. But it was not. It was a new invention that they could not control. 

by Alexandra Samuel, Ph. D. on JSTOR Daily February 19, 2019
https://daily.jstor.org/can-science-fiction-predict-the-future-of-technology/

Chesterton’s complaint is valid when people are taken out of their social context. He is concerned with eternal moral problems. Those never change. But the external world and our society within it all do change, especially now. And we believe that we have some control over those changes. 

Our choices are greatly consequential. Ivanhoe could help King Richard but he could do nothing about feudalism, even though Walter Scott (1771-1834) lived in a time of rapid and powerful changes. 

The Thomas Theorem of sociology says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Science fiction gives reality to unreal situations: colonies in space; plastic-eating bacteria; computer programs you can live inside of; artificial super humans with a four-year lifespan.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Like rockets into outer space, robots, and cloning, plastic-eating bacteria are now real. It is not that science fiction predicted those and multiverses more but that it allows us to model them, test them, plan our responses to them, and prepare for the changes we cannot predict and do not expect. 

For Chesterton, the most important problems were moral, and so they remain for us. 

Science fiction is not a set of engineering drawings—though you can buy the plans to the starship Enterprise—it is about the moral problems that people will solve in new  circumstances. That is the "science" in the fiction as defined by Steven Weinberg who identified the experiment as an unnatural arrangement designed to test a hypothesis. 

Previously on NecessaryFacts

Anthropocene: A Bad Name for a Good Thing

Coins and Stamps

Females and Women

Psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation to Big Data

Charles Lamb (1775 - 1834)

Charles Lamb was little more than a footnote to me, a minor English Romantic in the shadows of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, three whom I actually read once. What passed by in online browsing was the flat criticism that Lamb's essays were trivial and not to be used in teaching the art of writing. So, I got a book. In fact, Lamb is so out of favor that the University of Texas library shelves him only in the old Dewey decimal stacks. I took home the Modern Library edition, Complete Works and Letters (1935; Introduction by Saxe Commins). It required some adjustment but I found him as readable and enjoyable as Jane Austen and much more aligned to my prejudices than Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Herman Melville. 

Frontispiece in The Letters of Charles Lamb Newly Arranged,
With Additions, Edited with an Introduction and Notes
by Alfred Ainger, vol 1., New York, A. C. Armstrong & Son, 1888.
(From The Intenet Archive)

It is not so much the topics and subjects which must exist in a context. Lamb visits galleries, views paintings, reading them like essays of their own, which is the proper way to tour. Most people in my time walk through as fast as the crowd will allow as if these were television commercials. His correspondents knew the works first hand. I have to google them. And so, too, with most of the subjects.

The unstated complaint from the academics is that Lamb did not have a manor of nominally free serfs allowing him to compose and publish. Lamb was "forced to work as accountant" for the British East India Company when he could have shone  as brilliantly as his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Nevertheless, in this collection, Letter CXCII to Coleridge bears the heading "The Accountant's Office, April 26, 1816." I also confess that to find this book in the library, I was out of my assigned district when I stopped my patrol twice to visit the library, search for his works, and request this one. 

Lamb's intelligence allowed him to be prolific. He got a lot done. The tragedy of his early death - as with very many - was the lack of antibiotics or merely effective antiseptics: walking the street, he fell, scraped his face, and died of sepsis. 

For myself, it is not so much the essays and poems, each in its own entirety, as it is the phrases of which they are built. Language today has been abraded into Orwellian cant. (IMHO.) Of course, YMMV. So, I cannot pick a single passage that will sway any reader. I only offer an example that pleased me. (I am not going to insert a Smiley: even I have limits.) 

From “The Illustrious Defunct” (1825)

Never can the writer forget when, as a child, he was hoisted upon a servant's shoulder in Guildhall, and looked down upon the installed and solemn pomp of the then drawing Lottery. The two awful cabinets of iron, upon whose massy and mysterious portals, the royal initials were gorgeously emblazoned, as if after having deposited the unfulfilled prophecies within, the King himself had turned the lock and still retained the key in his pocket;—the blue-coat boy, with his naked arm, first converting the invisible wheel, and then diving into the dark recess for a ticket;—the grave and reverend faces of the commissioners eyeing the announced number;—the scribes below calmly committing it to their huge books;—the anxious countenances of the surrounding populace, while the giant figures of Gog and Magog, like presiding deities, looked down with a grim silence upon the whole proceeding,—constituted altogether a scene, which combined with the sudden wealth supposed to be lavished from those inscrutable wheels, was well calculated to impress the imagination of a boy with reverence and amazement. Jupiter, seated between the two fatal urns of good and evil, the blind Goddess with her cornucopia, the Parcæ wielding the distaff, the thread of life, and the abhorred shears, seemed but dim and shadowy abstractions of mythology, when I had gazed upon an assemblage exercising, as I dreamt, a not less eventful power, and all presented to me in palpable and living operation. Reason and experience, ever at their old spiteful work of catching and destroying the bubbles which youth delighted to follow, have indeed dissipated much of this illusion, but my mind so far retained the influence of that early impression, that I have ever since continued to deposit my humble offerings at its shrine whenever the ministers of the Lottery went forth with type and trumpet to announce its periodical dispensations; and though nothing has been doled out to me from its undiscerning coffers but blanks, or those more vexatious tantalizers of the spirit, denominated small prizes, yet do I hold myself largely indebted to this most generous diffuser of universal happiness. Ingrates that we are! are we to be thankful for no benefits that are not palpable to sense, to recognise no favours that are not of marketable value, to acknowledge no wealth unless it can be counted with the five fingers? If we admit the mind to be the sole depositary of genuine joy, where is the bosom that has not been elevated into a temporary elysium by the magic of the Lottery? Which of us has not converted his ticket, or even his sixteenth share of one, into a nest-egg of Hope, upon which he has sate brooding in the secret roosting-places of his heart, and hatched it into a thousand fantastical apparitions?

(MISCELLANEOUS PROSE BY CHARLES AND MARY LAMB EDITED BY E. V. LUCAS WITH A FRONTISPIECE

METHUEN & CO LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON; First Published in this form (Fcap. 8vo) in 1912; This Work was first Published in Seven Volumes (Demy 8vo) in 1903-5. (From Project Gutenberg) (Just to note that the Frontispiece in that work is not the one above. The book from Methuen showed Lamb in the attire of a Venetian senator.) 

Financing our governments with lotteries is voluntary, which taxation is not. In our time, American states launched them to pay for public education but the revenues always fall short of the demands and that can be  a subject for a different blog post. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Soldier's Heart by Elizabeth Samet 

Art & Copy 

Aaron Feldman: Buy the Book Before You Buy the Coin 

Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 Part 2