The November meeting produced a good debate regarding our financial affairs, membership dues, and membership renewals. It was resolved, that for the year 2000 membership dues will be $15 per member, with a Junior or student (up to grade 12) category set at $10 and a special family membership category set at $20.

Membership renewal also provoked some discussion. In the past, it was the custom to ask for payment by October for the upcoming year and each year, some folks paid, some folks were late with their payment, and other folks forgot completely. This did not help the Club’s cash position and certainly created additional bookkeeping for the Treasurer.

It was therefore resolved, and please note this carefully, that payment of dues for the year 200 must be received on or before the date of the January 2000 meeting. This first meeting of the New Year will be held in the Library, at Colonel Gray Senior High School, at 7:30 on Monday evening, January 17th. Please, attend the meeting and bring cash or a cheque, or send in your dues by mail to the address given at the top of the page. Please note also, that it was resolved that anyone who was not paid up by the time of the meeting will be dropped from the mailing list. We think that enjoyment of our hobby is greatly enhanced by your active membership in the Association. Come out to our meetings and join in the fun. We have a number of interesting evenings planned for the New Year and we hope to see you there.

Since the November meeting I have been quietly working away on my collection of Wellington tokens, and searching the Internet for information about the numismatic scene in the days of the “Iron Duke”. Searching the Internet is a very slow process, for the simple reason that there are often “links” to other sites that can provide fascinating distraction. For example, the Illinois Numismatic Association offers an entire page of links to other coin clubs. If you have access to a computer, try visiting the I.L.A. at this address: http://ilna.davesworld.net/local.htm. I did, and ended up visiting the Royal Numismatic Society of New Zealand and the Tasmanian Numismatic Society. The latter site is especially well done, and features not only stories and articles about coins, medals and tokens, but colour images of Australian coins, tokens, and paper money. As a bonus, you can read Dominic Labbe’s article, with colour illustrations, on the Canadian “Blacksmith” series of tokens.

And speaking of Illinois, the Chicago Coin Club has an excellent page, one of the best I’ve seen in my brief career surfing the numismatic web. The series of articles are well worth reading. Subjects include “English Merchant Tokens” by fellow numismatist Dr. Richard Doty and the philosophical musings of legendary American numismatist Q. David Bowers in “The Coin Hobby as I See It”. The Doty article has considerable relevance for Canadian token collectors, as you will see. You can access those “on-line” articles by starting at the Table of Contents page, which is www.ece.iit.edu/~prh/coins/PiN/pin.html. Good luck with your Internet surfing, and don’t forget that search engines -- those little buttons you can click to do the work for you -- can turn up some surprising things. I’ll mention a few more next time.

See you at Rodd’s on the 10th.

Mark Holton
President, PEINA
holton.fam@pei.sympatico.ca

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