Although when I was in grammar school I began collecting cents after I noticed they had different dates, it was only after I found and read Joseph Coffin's book on coin collecting that the realm of coin collecting opened up for me. I began date collections of liberty head nickels and dimes, although by that time those I found in circulation were well worn. One noon in the school cafeteria I did luck onto an extremely fine 1883 no cents liberty head nickel, undoubtedly taken from some parent's coin collection.

As I grew older I lost my interest in coins; it was only when I first came in contact with British coins (in a channel steamer at South Hampton during WW II, waiting for a safe time to cross to Le Havre) that I decided to get a set of the current British coins. I managed to get one of each denomination from a half crown down to a ha'penny, but there didn't seem to be any farthings around. I began questioning the crew members, and finally I found a sailor who dug into an inside pocket and produced one. When I asked him how much I owed him he refused to let me pay him for it.

Several years later I was in a bookstore and a numismatic newspaper caught my eye. On the cover it was announced that that issue contained current prices of English coins, which reminded me of my wartime souvenirs. I bought a copy, went home, and dug out my coins. Most of them were well worn and of little or no collector interest, but the little farthing, an extremely fine example from 1863, booked in uncirculated for fifty dollars. I realized that it must have been that British sailor's lucky pocket piece, generously given to a young American soldier headed into the European battlefields.

My reawakened interest in numismatics led me to subscribe to "Coin World", join a coin club, begin to buy coins by mail. One day I received a price list from Alfred Szego which contained several medals from the French medal mint commemorating events during the First Empire. One of these medals was described as having the Venus de Medici on it; I was interested and ordered it. Thus began my love affair with Napoleonic medals. When that little bronze medal arrived I was so enchanted that I went through Szego's list again and ordered several more of the medals. His response was to let me know that most of the listed medals had been sold, but he was sending me on approval all the Napoleonic medals he had in stock, offering me a discount on whichever ones I wanted to keep. I kept as many as I could afford, beginning what eventually amounted to a respectable collection.

Soon after receiving the Venus medal I remembered that over a decade earlier I had acquired a lot of books which contained one about Napoleonic medals. I looked it out; it turned out to be the first book published about those medals, written by a Captain Laskey and published in 1818, that is, during the part of Napoleon's life spent on the Island of Saint Helen's. The book, which is not illustrated, contains verbal descriptions of the medals on the list published by the French medal mint in 1815, along with some account of the circumstances which gave rise to the production of each medal listed. Laskey has a modest introduction in which he explains that his only purpose in writing the book was to help collectors identify the medals represented by the brief descriptions of the French list, that he did not intend to combat opinions or principles.

From some of the medals I obtained in that first lot from Szego I learned that there were Napoleonic medals which were not on that 1815 medal mint list; I met a fellow collector in New Orleans who showed me a book he had been given which included other medals from the period. I had to find a copy of that 1820 book (by Anne Mudie Scargill); then I learned of other books. Hans Schulman came up with a copy of the Helbig catalog of the Julius collection and one of the Essling collection. One by one I acquired the other great catalogs, the star of my collection being the Lenormant catalog of the empire medals, from the Sotheby sale of the library of Napoleon's brother Louis. I learned that many medals existed which were not mentioned in Laskey and Scargill.

It seemed natural to begin collecting books about Napoleon and his period; although the university library contained many of the important ones there were some which I wanted to own. References in some of those books to Le Moniteur, official or semi-official newspaper during Napoleonic times, made me want to read that newspaper. A friendly French professor was spending the summer in Paris, so I asked his wife to write him to find out how much it would cost to get a microfilm of the appropriate years. She relayed the message to me that since microfilming would be expensive and very slow, it would be better to look to interlibrary loan. She added that she had inquired at the university library, that it already had a microfilm file of that newspaper but only from 1847 on. When I went to the library to see the interlibrary loan people I was amazed to find that she was mistaken. The library had a complete file of the actual newspapers. Moreover, although the volumes had to be fetched from a remote storage location, when the first two folio volumes (1800) came, the reference librarian asked me whether I was going to read them in the library or wanted to check them out!

I spent a couple of years lugging volumes home and browsing through them, learning French while searching for items about the medals. I didn't learn much about the medals but I did learn quite a bit about the history of the times, at least the official version of it. Aulard's books which quote from the records of Napoleon's secret police as well as other archives, make more interesting reading.

A century ago Sloane estimated that there were more than one hundred thousand different books about Napoleon and his times; more new books and reprints of some of the old ones continue to pour from the presses. The literature is too enormous for anyone to comprehend in its entirety.