Sidebar to Picking Harvard's Pocket
Stealing the Catalog along with the Coins
"Incredible
as it seems to the uninitiated, there was no overall inventory
of the University coins," wrote Professor George M.A. Hanfmann in
an August 1974 report to Fogg director Daniel J. Robbins. In standard
numismatic practice, detailed catalog information was written on the
small envelopes that contained the coins. The envelopes had gone with
the coins. Detailed separate records did exist for the coins belonging
to the Dewing Foundation, but for only a few belonging to Harvard,
Hanfmann explained, although that situation would change in future
(as indeed it did).
Estimating the number of Harvard coins stolen was a frustrating job.
The keeper of the Coin Room, Patricia Mottahedeh, was aided by Ursula
Pause-Dreyer, who had become familiar with the collection the previous
summer while organizing a Fogg exhibition for a convention of visiting
numismatists, and by various Fogg staff members pitching in. The estimate
was based on such records as existed, most of which lacked specificity
and had not recently been checked against actual holdings. File cards
suggested that a certain group of modern coins, part of the large
Harvard College Library coin collection, should have been in the Coin
Room, but one worker hypothesized that they had been removed many
years before the theft. Hanfmann agreed that that could very well
be true "although no records can be found to confirm this." The estimate
was also based on the number of coins that the available drawer space,
once full but now empty, could contain.
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Hanfmann wrote, "What lack of time and funds made seemingly not feasible
for 25 years--to make a real survey of Coin Room holdings--is now
finally being done under unfavorable conditions after most of the
holdings have been stolen." He praised Mottahedeh for her hard work,
but seized the occasion to argue, in vain, that the Fogg needed a
part-time, professional numismatist to look after the coins. Professor
David Mitten sees today a shining opportunity for a full-time professor/curator
of Greek, Roman, and Byzantine numismatics and thinks the absence
of one is inappropriate.
