 It's so welcome to the latest presentation in the Festival of Coins. Today, we're joined by Jesse Kraft, who's a curator at the American Humanism Society, and we're really excited to be able to present a live launch of a new website that Jesse's been working on. That's the Medellic Art Company website. So over to you, Jesse. And we're really interested to hear more about the project. Great. Hello, Jesse Kraft. I'm going to start sharing my screen. All right. So this is the Medellic Art Company Archives website. Just a little bit of a background of the Medellic Art Company is one of the oldest or was one of the oldest mints, private mints in the United States. It lasted from 1903, 1907-ish to 2013. While they weren't necessarily, you know, absolutely the oldest they were arguably one of the most important. They made many, many medals for thousands of different clients. Even such thing as the Peabody Awards and so on. In 2018, the archives of the Medellic Art Company went to public auction after they went bankrupt and the American Mismatic Society purchased them. And it ranged in content from a near complete collection of medals that they produced throughout their entire existence, as well as digital archives, a lot of paper archives, binders, books that they used in-house during the production process. Dyes, dye shells, galvanos, literally hundreds of tons of material that were still really in the process of trying to organize and catalog. So this website I made as not necessarily a short term website. We do want to use it for a few years, but kind of just to allow people to have some sort of insight into what the collection has. And it's really a blog. So there's content that I posted on there. And then there's going to be, there is a blog that I will be periodically updating as we process the archives as well. So this is the landing page. Medallic Archives Company Archives held by the American Mismatic Society. This is the Medallic Art Company logo and then the American Mismatic Society logo. I have the website into four main sections. The first is actually the Mako Specimen Archive itself. I'll click that. And these are actually the documents that Mako used in order to catalog the collection as they went through it. Dick Johnson in the 60s and the 70s made this catalog and then it just grew from there. There are many, many errors that I've found in the catalog as I've been going through it piece by piece. But we still decided to kind of post this because it's kind of cool to see what Mako used in-house. Even up here you can see a specimen image archive, proprietary and confidential, not for distribution. That was Mako's policy. Now we own it and we kind of just wanted to let it out there because it's going to take us probably a couple of years before we have a complete and hopefully error-free catalog that we will be able to post and it won't be in this format necessarily either. As you can see there are lots of different things that we don't need. This is kind of the code for the image. We won't have that and some of the information is wrong. Also things like reverse aren't next to each other which can cause some sort of confusion as you're going through it. So simple things like that we plan to update into a more modern and error-free catalog in due time. But some things that you are able to do with this now is if you have a Mako metal, which some of them aren't necessarily that rare and the fact that they made more than 15,000 metals throughout their career, chances are that you can come across a metal Mako relatively easy for a relatively inexpensive amount. But at the same time, not know what it is just because there are so many made for so many purposes. So we wanted to kind of just release this catalog as is and allow people to kind of have fun with it because it is kind of a fun little thing to go through. They're cataloged separated by decade. So here's the first decade, they didn't make too many but as time went on, the catalogs just got more and more intense and even actually by the 60s they actually had to catalog or break them up into five years, half decades instead of full decades just because they were getting way too long. But as you can see, I mean, you know, there's just a whole plethora of different metals that Mako made. And again, you could very easily come across one and have no idea what it is, when it was made or anything like that. So this catalog will give you at least the bare minimal information that you might be looking for including the name of the metal, who the client that commissioned it, where that client was located, the artist that sculpted the metal and also different sizes of the metal because some metals weren't only in one size but you can have the same metal in various sizes as well as different compositions as well. So this is kind of, you know, a fun little insight that we're hoping people will play around with. And if by all means, if you come across an error, let me know and I can update it because there are many of them in here and it is an awfully long catalog for one person to have to go through. So I'm kind of hoping that the collector community will help out with that. Unfortunately, there were two little sections, 2000 to 2004 and then 2010 to 13 that we didn't get the PDFs for. I do have them printed out. So if you do come across to make a metal that are from either of those little sections, you're more than welcome to reach out to me. I'm sure we can post my email in the description of this video and I'll be more than happy to help you out with that. Another section that I created kind of for eye candy was for images, different historical images of Mako. I have two different sections. One is actually of the production process itself. So here you can see the James H. Hyde medallion on the Jean-Vierre reduction machine. Right here is the die shell and it's tracing it and engraving it into the die. And this is the actual die that would then strike metals. You can see the same to the right is the obverse of the metal being reduced and then over here is the reverse of the metal being reduced. Right here is the metal itself. You can see the bust is right there and then the four smaller busts being reduced over here. So this is some of the digital archives that we've received along with the Mako archives. I kind of just found all these images in an unmarked folder had a lot of fun with them, kind of go through them and trying to figure out what the different metals are because they weren't marked as such. So I had to use the catalog that I just showed you to kind of find out what these were just based off the image. It's the 1951 World and Metallurgical Congress that was held in Detroit. And there's the die shell, something's happened with that. Here's the finished die. It's being taken out. I think it was just a kneel, which means it was hardened. Here's a finished metal with the coating being put on it towards the end. And then this metal actually has a mounting bar in the reverse and here's one of the Mako workers putting the mounting bar on. You can see the finished metal here. There and here's the mounting bar that he's hottering on. So that was kind of fun to go through. World War II campaign metals Mako made in addition to like large round bronze metals that were used to Mako made a lot of war decorations for the United States military. Pretty much any time there was a war that the United States was involved with, if you go through the Mako catalog you can inevitably see a bunch of war decorations that they made as well. And they are kind of being sorted and then packed for distribution. And I did account and there's literally upwards of 100,000 metals right here. So they didn't make them in small numbers. So they're definitely out there for collectors. And then here's a series of photos that they don't necessarily show the metal. So I couldn't positively identify the picture with a metal in that production process. But a bunch that are just kind of cool. Here's an employee making blank planchets for metals, being struck, some more of the production process. Ginsburg is kind of sorting them out and then distribution. So this kind of gives you an insight into how Mako operated in the mid 50s in the mid 20th century. I go back one, I have a second set of photos. These are recipients of Mako metals. And this is really where kind of a lot of Mako metals really entered into American society was through different achievements and things like that. So this is Carl Meyer who won the American Legion School Award as well as the pin that's pinned to them. That was, these are both a part of that award. Carl was born in Germany, but his parents had passed away and then he was raised by an uncle in San Francisco. And it said on the back, there was a little piece of paper that he said that he hoped to join the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. Here is Nino Martini who is a famous tenor on the radio in the 1930s. In the process of winning the CBS Guest Medallion Award, Martini was actually the first radio artist to be signed by leading role for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. Here's Catherine Cornell who was awarded the Delia Austrian Medal for Distinguished Performance in 1935 for her work in Romeo and Juliet. This was at the Central Park Casino, the 25th anniversary for the Drama League. For anyone of these individuals that are kind of more well known, just this little side note, I was able to actually link them to their Wikipedia page just to give you a little bit more insight. So if you see a name that has a link that their names are highlighted, you're able to click them and go to a Wikipedia page to learn more about the individual. That wasn't necessarily the case with everyone. For instance, Carl Meyer up here, he didn't necessarily become well known enough in history to warrant his own Wikipedia page. So I wasn't able to link that to any. But Nino Martini as well, famous tenor, go down. Here we have Malvina Hoffman who is a famous sculptress throughout the 30s and 40s and she is in the process of winning the American Women's Association Medallion and Pearl S. Buck is awarding it to her. So here we have Gifford Pinchot who is the Pennsylvania governor as well as a very famous nature conservator in the United States. This is grandson, Dr. Petrus Debye over here is winning the Gregor P. Mendel medal and very famous one, Amelia Earhart being awarded the National Geographic Society special gold medal by President Herbert Hoover in 1932. Lester Goldsmith winning the George Wallace Melville medal in 1939. And lastly, Harold E. Stesson who's the governor of Minnesota on the right. Winning the parents magazine medal for his outstanding service to children being awarded by public publisher, George Hecht and this person right here is Linda Kassen who is the quote unquote little magazine cover girl during that period. So these are really examples of different makeup medals that were kind of entering American society in the way that they were intended to be as awards for recognition of different achievements. So this is really kind of a special little page for me and a lot of these actually didn't while I was going through these photos which are again, we're in a kind of an unmarked folder in the Mako digital archives. I kind of had to do a little bit more research using the catalog that I had already shown you and kind of figure out what medal the individuals was winning at the time and who the people were. So that was another fun little project. We go down and show you the next part which are different essays that I've written. This is kind of incomplete. I haven't quite finished this. I want to add a few more essays but I have one, you know, what are medals? You know, kind of the sort of thing, you know, we know it when we see it but you know, there is a distinct group of, you know, a subsection of numismatics that constitute medals and within that, you know, there's actually quite a different, quite a few different types of medals that constitute a medal. Like here's an art medal which is just for pure sake of art. I mean, there's no real, you know, a lot of these weren't necessarily awarded as decorations or awards or anything like that but simply for a means for an artist who express him or herself. Here's society medals. This is the Edward T. Newell Presidential Medal for the New York Numismatic Club. Every president of the New York Numismatic Club gets their portrait on the obverse of one of these medals. That's a tradition that carries on to today and has since 1908. So these are society medals, you know, kind of different ways that medals are dispersed as well. Portrait medals are similar to art medals except they're usually commissioned by a person and it's, you know, they're not awarded in any given way. The artist usually has pretty strict guidelines that they have to follow. You know, here's Audrey and Newell, the obverse and the reverse the coin or the medals and most likely their parents commissioned it just to kind of celebrate the lives of these children. Here are decorations that I was telling you about. These are usually given for, many of them are given for military reasons but also sports accomplishments pretty much, you know, lots of different types of accomplishments can be awarded by a decoration that usually gets pinned on one's shirt or jacket as opposed to the medals that I was showing you earlier with the recipients that are the traditional, you know, larger round bronze medals. And some other, I didn't put photographs for all of them, commemorative medals, souvenir medals that if you go, you know, to an exhibition or a fair or something like that, you can find them there. Religious medals, orders, and then table medals are really the ones that are kind of too large to be held in a traditional way. So a lot of them are placed into wooden stands and stuff like that and are displayed on a table. Medallic production process. If you haven't watched The Metal Maker, it's an absolutely incredible movie. It's a half hour long. It was made in 1929 and it shows Lara Garden Frasier creating the National Sculpture Society special Medal of Honor. I'm not gonna play it in its entirety here but please do watch it. And it really is an incredible movie that really documents from how metal is made from a blank canvas, you know, through the whole artist's artistic process. And then even after the artist is done with it, what Mako or a similar manufacturing company would do with it. And this medal was actually made by Mako. So you get to see a video of Mako actually making the medal in 1929. This video is actually thought to be lost for several decades. And then it was rediscovered in the late 1990s and then Elizabeth Jones, who was the former chief engraver of the United States Mint kind of did a voice over to it. And then the American Museumatic Society helped publish it and reproduce it. And I have a, not necessarily lengthy but a little bit more detailed description of how metals were made by Mako in particular. I, for research for this, I used an article that was published in the Numismatist, the publication of the American Numismatic Association. It was published in 1978. This, an article by Edward R. Rove, who was a private sculptor, as well as he was also a mint engraver for a short time in the early 1960s. And he got into pretty good detail on his techniques of the metal making process. And then also, since he had first hand knowledge of dealing with the metallic art company, he was able to give rather specific production processes by them as well. So that was, if you're interested at all in how metals are made, this is really the section for you. I have a brief kind of leading up to the metallic art company metals in the United States before World War I. Mako kind of started just before that. So this is just kind of like a brief history on metals before Mako and what they represented. The Libertas Americana Metals, one of the most famous in a lot of United States coins were inevitably designed after this, the Liberty Cap sense and the flowing hair dollar and everything else. Again, not gonna necessarily read all of it, but kind of just give you a brief introduction to it just to kind of let you go back and read it on your own. Mint metals and starts to discuss kind of the artistic turn right around in the 1890s and 1900s when James Earl Frazier, Gustav St. Goggins, Victor David Brenner started to get into the medallic making process which really revolutionized how metals were made and the artistic quality of them. It's a very famous metal by James Earl Frazier that portrays Augusta St. Goggins. And this here is actually made by John Davison's and Son's Philadelphia, but it shows the Jean-Vierre reduction machine, actually two different kind of reduction machines, but the odd verse one is the one that is really integral to the medallic making process. The essays, I have one more, that is the history of Mako, kind of the early years. I'm working on kind of subsequent years right now that I just haven't quite finished yet and haven't been able to upload, but eventually I'm gonna have similar pages to go to other sections of history of Mako, and then eventually I wanna write a much larger book on the history of Mako. This is actually the very first set of dyes that Mako made was designed by Augusta St. Goggins and he commissioned Mako to reduce the dyes. Interestingly enough, Mako actually didn't actually strike any metals for the first, about 15 years of their existence. They were only a dye reduction company. This is another one that they reduced in 1909, Jules-Edward Ronay. This was the first Mako metal to include the Mako name, you can see it right here. It's actually in the dyes and subsequent metals, they kind of counter struck the metals on the edge, usually on the bottom edge with Medallic Art Company and whatever location they were at the time, most of their existence, they were in New York and then in the 70s, they moved to Connecticut and then in the 80s to Sioux Falls, South Dakota and then they moved to Nevada and that's where they ended up was in the bottom. This was the first metal produced by the Vile Brothers who were the founders of Mako, but when they first found at the company, they were actually kind of under the auspices of a different company that they worked for at the time and there was kind of some legal trouble that they had but then they were finally able to purchase the name and purchase the equipment and this is the first one that they produced as the Medallic Art Company and as the sole owners in 1910. And this is Henry Vile, Felix Vile on the right and then Clyde Trees and Clyde Trees is really, he was key on making the Medallic Art Company grow in 1919 and 1920 and beyond that and without them or without Clyde Trees, Mako probably would still never have struck any metals as the Vile Brothers were kind of intent on maintaining just the dye reduction company and working with their artist friends where Clyde Trees really expanded on that and started to get commissions from outside sources and really is the person who made Mako into one of the more important Medallic Art Companies in the United States. And I have one more little section, the future of Mako. I don't think there are any images in here yet. There are, I'll get to that. But the future of Mako kind of just outlines what we the American Numismatic Society wants to do with this massive, massive collection that we purchased. First and foremost, like I said before we want to update the catalog. There are some missing pieces in there so add missing pieces, get rid of any errors and stuff like that. We want to make a website that focuses on Mako and American Society, which is kind of the direction that not a lot of Numismatic publications take per se. A lot of them, especially when it comes to the Medallic Arts a lot of people kind of focus on the artists. While we still do want to focus on that we also feel that the clients, there's a very long list of clients that we have that kind of sum up all of American Society in the United States as well as the recipients. A lot of these medals are highly prized both now and when they were first issued. Some of them we have already been able to kind of locate lists of winners of these different medals and like I've said a few times when people have won or been awarded a Mako medal that's kind of like when the piece of art was able to enter American Society and that's a key point is kind of key in the medal and the medallic art history and the history of the specific medals. So it's one of the reasons why I added so many pictures of people actually being awarded the medal because really it's just important kind of instant snapshot of that happening. I do have I kind of went through a small selection of medals and kind of updated them to give a brief snapshot of what a finished catalog entry might look like. Given that I made this website on WordPress and the finished website might not be on WordPress it probably won't have this exact layout but if you remember the catalog there was just small pictures and just little bits of information so we kind of wanted to expand on that a little bit actually catalog them and give the typology type out the legends again if there is a Wikipedia page for any of the people I was able to pull into that give, provide what's listed on the edge compositions, diameters, thicknesses and weights and then also the artist and the client that that made the medal possible. So I did that with I think nine different ones here is what a series would look like so pretty much the same but then when you get to the bottom you kind of see that this medal is part of a larger series and I put links to the different series to the different medals that are in the series and I want to show this one too it doesn't have a traditional dye number because they didn't actually make dyes in it or out of them but this is the galvano for the gallant ship award the full name is the merchant marine gallant ship citation and if this wasn't actually awarded to people but it awarded to entire ships it started out in World War II as an executive order by President Roosevelt and ships still win it to the present day or earn it I should say to the present day and if an entire ship did something kind of heroic they would get this is 20 and three quarters and it wasn't reduced to a dye so they would get this larger than two feet or almost a whole meter plaque awarded and kind of put somewhere in a special place inside the ship. Have the artist, the client was the United States government gave a little brief history about it but then here I have a list of all the different ships that were awarded this medal throughout the history and if the ship has again a Wikipedia page I was able to link to that, not all of them do but it's kind of interesting. Lastly, I have a frequently asked questions these are the three questions I get asked the most what's in the archives you know I pretty much said that in your complete reference collection of all the medals, business records, in-house histories galvanos, dyes, everything, photographs, correspondence I always get asked can you tell me about this medal and get sent an email image and I pretty much just go through the catalog and find the medal and tell them what brief history I can tell them about from the catalog and now with the catalog online hopefully that'll circumvent this question and then also I get this question a lot you know I'm a representative of X company and my company has utilized Mako's services in the past to have medals struck and I always get asked if I have the dyes for them. We, the American and Mismatic Society actually while we bought the entirety of the archives a lot of the dyes are still active so people do still want to get medals struck from them and for the active section of the medallic art company I have here that Metal Craft Mint Incorporated who are just outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin they actually are still producing Mako medals under the name I think it's just medallic art medals is what they go by now but so if you have any questions about any active dyes or anything like that you should contact Metal Craft Mint Incorporated because they are still kind of carrying on the Mako tradition to this day and that in a nutshell is basically the new medallic art company archives website. That's brilliant. Thank you Jesse, that's really interesting. One of the things that impresses me is as you say the way it's kind of put everything in context so it's not just the study of the medals themselves it's putting them in context of kind of social history. Right, yeah, as a research institution we felt that was important to kind of have that context and everything and not just provide a essentially just provide a list of medals we want to actually do something with this because we really do feel that it does capture a really interesting section of United States history throughout the whole 20th century and into the 21st even so that was very important for us to kind of include that. Excellent, so around 15,000 medals, is that right? Yes. Okay, so how many do you think you can kind of cover in the website in the future? We're going to do all of them. Really? Yes. I've been going through the medals one by one and just kind of getting the basic components of them the weight, the composition, the diameter and the thickness and it's taken me several months and I started in 1907 with the first medal that's in the catalog and I'm up to 1985 right now. So it's a slow process. Of course I can't only concentrate on that but that in itself is time consuming. One of the things that we did also get with the archives were digital files of each of the photographs. So all the little photographs that you saw in the catalog we do have larger ones of those but a lot of them were struck in 2010 or before. That's when the photograph was taken so they're not the best quality anymore and like JPEGs degrade over time and stuff like that and the more you open them. So we also eventually want to re-photograph all of the medals as well which is going to take, we're going to have to hire a photography assistant for that and everything. So unfortunately when you think of one new thing that you want to do with the medals you have to do it 15,000 times. So even when you're halfway through and you're like oh I should do this then you have to go back and just start all the way over. So one thing we want to do before we make one final pass through the entire collection is kind of make sure we have all the bases covered and know exactly what we want to do with it before we start again. Because I've started over a few times with different little things and it just takes me a few weeks just to catch up to the point to where I was because I would have to do it a couple thousand times. Yeah, okay. So 15,000 medals, have you got a favorite? It's really tough. I really like this one, it's kind of interesting. Let me share my screen again. Zoom, share screen. I like this one here that I have and I do have an image of it in images. It's not in images, it is in essays. What are medals? Here's the full one right here. It's kind of interesting. This is like an underwater scene and the thing that I really like about it is that most of the medals have this kind of neutral bronze finish. You can see all of them essentially have that same kind of bronze finish but the finish on this with the green patina is really kind of eye-catching and right when I saw it, it's just like, you know, kind of, you know, we have them all on trays right now and they kind of just lit up the tray and it immediately stuck out. You know, there's some other things, like the Peabody Award is kind of cool just because it's so well-known. The Pulitzer Prize, they struck the Pulitzer Prize, it's extremely well-known. So kind of seeing those, you know, the kind of, you know, collection example that Mako had of those is kind of exciting because a lot of the things on the edge that they struck in there, you know, countersunk into the edge on those specific examples are not on the pieces that were released because they, you know, had little hints or clues about the production process itself. So, yeah, they're not, well, you know, the face, but the obverse and the reverse will look pretty much exactly the same. You know, there's little hints on the production process on the edge of all of these metals that aren't on metals that you would find in, you know, otherwise. Okay. And would you say, are there any metals that are, you know, really historically significant? I think that the Pulitzer is probably very, you know, historically significant. Also, some of the Lincoln metals that were produced for the centennial of his birth in 1909, they were some of the first ones made by Mako. And, you know, historically have, you know, kind of held their weight as far as, you know, being important metals that commemorate that, that the centennial. Yeah, excellent. So are there any metals in the, in the archives that are unique to the archive? There is one that kind of comes to mind pretty immediately. Apparently in the early 2000s, Bill Gates actually had a portrait metal commissioned by Mako with his bust on the obverse and his son's bust on the reverse. And while it's not quite unique, he only had two struck, one for him and one for his son. And then of course, the third one was struck for the archives. Okay. So, you know, not quite unique, but, you know, pretty darn close to it. Yeah. And, you know, everyone knows Bill Gates. So that's, you know, not a nobody name. So that was a really cool one to come across. Yeah. But then, you know, in addition to all the metals themselves, we have like the dies to get the larger galvanos and stuff like that. And all of those are unique. You know, they only made one, you know, galvanos in order to make the die to make multiple metals. So each of those are unique in their own right. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. Well, that's brilliant. Thanks so much for your time. Yes. Really good resource. And good luck with the, with the ongoing project. I think it'll keep you, keep you going for a very long time. Oh yeah. Absolutely. I'm tempted to say you deserve a medal for what you've done. No, that's too, too bad. Maybe at the end. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks, Jesse. Bye.