Bank-note

If you are a collector of Canadian Bank Notes, this book is an absolute necessity. Currently, there are no other similar resources available.

Newcomers to the hobby often confuse Canadian Bank Notes with currency issued by the Government of Canada. This guide will keep you straight as it lists all the issues from the private banks that no longer exist but once competed with the government in the printing of money. It contains a description of the banks, images of all the notes, as well as book values at various grades from G to UNC.

Even if you are just a casual collector of Bank of Canada issues, this catalogue may peak your interest. I find that the bank notes tend to be more artistic, and they all have historical, cultural and regional significance which makes for an interesting endeavour.

This is an excellent book about banknotes from Venezuela. It covers banknotes issued by the Central Bank since it's establishment in 1940. Also, this book carries information about banknotes printing technologies and the process of designing it. It has some information about private banknotes issues before the Central Bank. It's colorfull illustrated. The issues covered by this book is until 1989, but this book worth it. Maybe soon, there is a new edition of this book covering banknotes throught today.

This together with the Standard Catalog of National Bank Notes are "must haves" for collectors. A bit out of date but still invaluable. Hopefuly they both will be updated soon.

these 4 vols. are all you would need if you are a collector of amer, obsolete currency. these are the only books you need to excel in the hobby of obsolete currency. the best. 5 stars

Howard Berlin's book, The Coins and Banknotes of Palestine Under the British Mandate, 1927-1947, is the perfect reference for anyone interested in collecting this series. The Palestine Mandate period provided the prologue to all the current tensions of the Middle East, and the design of the coins and notes was done in such a way as to give all the communities living there an equal and unbiased monetary system. As an "accidental" collector of the coin series, I was particularly impressed to learn of the great rarity of some of the coins and in particular of the higher denomination banknotes. I definitely recommend this book to any serious collector.

As an avid collector of Palestine coins and currency, I found this book to be exceptionally well written, and the subject matter very well researched. There's plenty of other stuff that 's included in the book that makes it even better. Dr . Berlin is obviously an authority on this subject. I was very impressed with the information on how some of the high denomination notes changed hands, for how much, and to who.

fdoudar@aol.com

As an avid collector of Palestine coins and Banknotes, I found this book to be very informative, based on serious and detailed research , and written by someone that is obviously an authority on the subject. The information on the historical sales of the high denomination items interested me a lot. Also, the information on the canceled notes was the first that I have seen. I would have wanted to see more photos included , maybe photos of where they printed the notes or minted the coins. Overall, I give this book a very high rating !!!!

fdoudar@aol.com I

The book shows it's age in the rariety ratings of the various banks and their banknotes. Basic information on number of notes printed, types printed, etc. is still valuable information

An absolute must for collectors - together with Kelly's National Bank Notes. Now a bit dated. Hopefully both will be updated in the near future.

Mark Twain's 1,000,000 bank note is a charming story with a few suprises. Whe a man is shipwrecked his life takes a surprising turn. He finds himself accross the Atlantic Ocean without a cent to his name and with only what he is wearing. In England his missfortune interests two welthy men who decide to make a bet on him. He is given only a 1,000,000 pound bank note and a month on his own. Mark twain uses humor and irony wonderfully in this book. As in many of his books insights into human nature, especcially pride, are enlightening and logical. I would recomend this book to anyone who enjoys humorus short stories without too much slapstick.

Portugal, late 1920s. The nation is prospering, but prices are increasing steadily. Somebody is pumping cash into the economy on a large scale, but who? Meanwhile rumors of counterfeit money are everywhere, but all the banknotes inspected at the Bank of Portugal seem legitimate... A fascinating book about a unique counterfeiting fraud. The counterfeiting was literally perfect, but to reveal how and why here would give the book away. If you like books about frauds, scams, and swindles, this little-known book is for you.

There is much positive to say about Nancy Parker McDowell's "Notes from Ramallah". The book is compiled from letters and journals written during the 1938-39 school year, when the author travelled to British Mandate Palestine and taught in a Friends School in Ramallah. The writing has a lively, contemporaneous quality that transports the reader back to that time and place.

The book is well worth reading for McDowell's marvelous portraits of 1939 Arab Palestine -- and many of the people and customs she encountered during her year long stay there. Her affection for her students, for the people of Ramallah and for their culture is obvious. She is also an incidental (and almost casual) witness to the Arab revolt against the British.

McDowell is clearly something of an adventurer. Without bombast or bragging, she nevertheless paints a lively self portrait of a young woman who was somewhat naive, but also strong, confident, and independent-- well before those qualities were truly in fashion among American women.

McDowell's treatment of the Arab-Jewish conflict, on the other hand, is disturbing. McDowell forthrightly acknowledges that, during her entire almost one-year stay, she has virtually no contact with Jewish Palestine. She expresses some passing curiousity about the Jews, yet she blithley and unquestioningly accepts the fact that ANY contact with the Jews would offend her Arab friends and would make her an object of suspicion. Accordingly, she has neither any understanding nor any "feel" whatsoever for the Jewish perspective on Palestine -- and she is remarkably untroubled by this.

McDowell likewise seems virtually oblivious to the obvious dangers already facing Jews in Europe. While she occasionally throws out a single sentence here and there about the need for Jews facing anti-Semitism to have some place to go, she seems to have no real understanding of how brutal the situation already was by 1939. (The Nuremberg Laws, which essentially deprived German Jews of citizenship and the right to earn a living, travel, etc., were enacted in 1935; Kristallnacht took place in 1938). Indeed, she eagerly travels to Nazi Germany just a few months prior to the outbreak of World War II, has no particular problem when her roomate decides to stay in that country and teach there, and congratulates herself for criticizing the Hitler regime in a presumably friendly enough "political debate" with some Nazi soldiers.

Thus the 22 year old McDowell has no real contact with Palestinian Jewry, their views, their claims or their history. She likewise demonstrates almost no feel whatsoever for the oppression facing Jews in Europe. Yet, even as she pays lip service to the notion that the Jews may need somewhere to go, she concludes (with no evidence or real argument) that sparsely populated Palestine is "too small" -- for further Jewish emigration. She thus would join her Arab neighbors and the British in barring the Jews from Palestine while offering them no real alternative -- except to stay where they are. (The European powers and the U.S., had earlier made clear there was no room for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.) It is almost as if she accepted the world's "not in my backyard" view of the Jewish problem as the "moral solution".

This sort of naivete might be forgiven in a 23 year old young woman, fresh out of college, on her first trip abroad and exposed to only one side of a multi-faceted and complex problem. But McDowell compounds the problem in her occasional annotations to the original text -- annotations presumably written within the last couple of years.

She notes, seemingly with disapproval, the Jewish rejection of the British 1939 "White Paper" which, on the eve of the Holocaust, bars further Jewish emigration to Palestine -- and consigns Palestinian Jews to permanent minority status (in other words, a replication, in many ways of the permanently vulnerable Jewish condition in Europe). She never acknowledges that the Holocaust, proved the Zionists right, if in no other way, at least in their notion that the Jews needed a place to go to be safe and to govern themselves.

She decries the lack of a Palestinian Arab state, yet she ignores the Arab rejection of the UN's mandated partition a decade later -- which would have created that very state in 1947! And she completely ignores generations of criminally negligent Arab leadership, from the Grand Mufti through today, that has not only suppressed alternate views within the Arab community, but repeatedly refused to take steps that could have led to viable statehood for Arab Palestine.

She decries Israeli occupation of Ramallah and other "territories" captured in the 1967 War, but nowhere acknowledges that it was Arab armies massed on every single Israeli border that provoked that war. She rightly condemns the brutal excesses of the Israeli occupation of those territories, but nowhere analyzes the treatment of area residents during decades of Egyptian and Jordanian rule. She never once discusses the continuing anti-Jewish violence, both organized and spontaneous -- violence that long predates the establishment of Israel itself -- as providing the Israelis with ample reason to be concerned about security.

So this is a book to be read and enjoyed for what it is -- a loving portrait of a largely vanished culture and a fascinating picture of pre-tourist travel -- steamships, old trains, unspoiled sights. I had hoped, as well, for a bit more insight, maybe a glimpse at the roots of a terrible, wasteful, tragic conflict -- but, for that, alas, one must look elsewhere.