Speaking Of Charlton...

Locked down in upstate New York for the last six weeks, I've finally dug out a couple of boxes of Canadian tokens I haven't looked at in maybe 35 years. Back then I was collecting the exonumia of the entire "British World," more or less according to Remick, Pridmore, Rennick, Lyall, Haxby/Willey, and other distinguished catalogers. Since then I've narrowed my interest down considerably, focusing almost exclusively on the British copper and silver tokens of 1811-20, with Davis, Dalton, and The Big Green Withers as my bibles.

Thanks to the "Anglo-Canadian" component of my current specialty -- the copper side of it, at least -- I've kept up with the Charlton token catalogs as well. I received the latest (10th edition) back in February, I guess.

In any event, in my coronaboredom I thought I'd check out my old hoard of blacksmith tokens against the new Charlton to see how they've been doing, value-wise. Some appear to have appreciated very nicely over the last 3-4 decades, but it's hard to figure how that appreciation is just general run-of-the-mill inflation.

My big letdown, however, was the catalog itself: pages 205-224 are missing, and those pages cover roughly half the blacksmith universe.

Fortunately, my collection of Charltons is complete, so I went to my back copies...only to find out that the 9th edition is missing the same pages. Thankfully, those pages are present in my copies of the 7th and 8th editions, so I had something for reference, but the values are probably obsolete and out the window by now.

Thanks to the miracle of modern e-mail, within a few days I had the bookseller and the editor, with both of whom I've done some business over the years, on the case. I'll be returning the books for replacements from the publisher, and Clement reports that the distributor checked their supply and found no issues there...so I guess I'm special.

Thought I'd ask here whether any of you have run into the same problem...or if you wouldn't mind checking your Charlton 9th and 10th to see whether my find amounts to two consecutive unique mint errors. (Again, that's pages 205-224.)

By way of eye candy for my exonumaniacal brethren (and sistern, if any), I'll add one of my more recent additions at the end of this entry. Looking forward to hearing about your Charlton!

Thank you, and stay safe, please ~
Tom