I’ve been exploring Schaefer’s scanned archive in preparation for my next co-authored article on the dataset and also as a means of quality control checking the scanning and file labelling etc… done by the professional archivist. A nice student from Sydney wrote me this morning about Auletes and that got me thinking again about RRC 419. Once I ran the Esty’s stats I realized Schaefer’s coverage was 99% and that he’d identified all obverse and reverse dies for this small part of this smallish issue. There were also far more shared dies than in most issues I’ve looked closely at (so far). For instance, most of RRC 330/1 most dies have a single pair with only the vary occasional sharing. So thinking about RBW and his interest in the organization the mint, thought I might try to map RRC 419/1. Tomorrow I am going to go in and color long legend vs. short legend reverse dies and see if any patterns emerge there. It was a good exercise. Partly just to get my brain off current events but also to think through the subjective part of such mapping and why I was preferring one visual lay out of the information over another.
One thing that seems extra clear is that 1a wasn’t really meant to be a separate type or subtype from 1b,.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 