The Annual Report of the American Numismatic Society for the year beginning October 1, 1997 and ending September 30, 1998 is presented herewith.

The end of the year ushered in a new era in the life of our Society. On October 2, 1998, the ANS purchased 140 William Street, a premier location in New York's financial district, as the Society's future world headquarters. Plans are now well underway to transfer the collections, library, and personnel to our new home and to develop strategic goals for an exciting exhibition program, for expanding the Society's commitment to public education in numismatics, and for creating a welcome environment for all visitors to the library and collections. Over the course of the next year, we shall be reaching out to our constituency and to all those who appreciate the beauty and lore of numismatics for advice, counsel, and support as we usher in the new millennium with our new home and our profoundly expanded mission.

In anticipation of our move, we have taken a number of steps to strengthen the Society's governing Council, staff, and committees, to identify and bring on board the talent and energy necessary to accomplish this important milestone in our institutional history. Last fall we began an extensive search for an Assistant Director culminating in the selection of Ute Wartenberg who joined the staff in July. Following studies at Saarbrucken University, she received her Ph.D. from Oxford University in 1990 and has, since 1991, been at the British Museum as Curator of Greek Coins. Dr. Wartenberg brings to her ANS position strong curatorial, managerial, and development experience and has already become a highly productive member of the Society's administration. In October the Council welcomed as its newest member George U. Wyper, President of Wyper Capital Management of New York. In July Jonathan H. Kagan was appointed Chairman of the Finance Committee succeeding Landon Thomas who announced his resignation from the committee while remaining an active member of the Council.

The death of ANS Councillor and Past President Harry W. Bass, Jr. on April 4, 1998, ended an era in the history of the Society largely defined by his ideas and influence. At the 1998 Members Appreciation Day in July, the Society bestowed its Distinguished Volunteer Award on the Harry Bass Research Foundation in recognition of the many services provided to the ANS by this foundation established by Mr. Bass in 1991. The award was received in person by Doris Bass, Harry's widow and President of the HBRF, to whom the Society also presented a specially bound edition of Harry W Bass Jr., Memories of His Life, a biographical tribute edited by ANS Councillor Margo Russell and Leslie A. Elam, the Society's Executive Director. The program included, as well, recognition of six seasoned and two new volunteers who contributed their time and talents to the ANS during the past year. In what has become a tradition at Members Appreciation Day, the afternoon was capped with a talk by an ANS Fifty-Year Member, the historian and popular writer, T. R. Fenrenbach of San Antonio, TX.

The annual Coinage of the Americas Conference, a program series initiated by Mr. Bass in 1984, was devoted in 1997 to "The Medal in America," reprising a theme originally presented in 1987. In addition to a formal symposium on November 8 and a medallic demonstration workshop on the 9th, the weekend also included the opening of three new exhibitions featuring modern medals, including a special showing of "A Life in the Arts: Medallic Works of Gilroy Roberts," sponsored by the Gilroy and Lillian P. Roberts Trust, together with two exhibits bearing the joint title, "Two Sides: Art Medallions from Both Sides of the Atlantic." COAC 1997 was chaired by ANS Curator of Medals Alan M. Stahl. Dr. Stahl also serves as Secretary of the Saltus Award Committee which conferred the Society's 1998 Medal "for distinguished achievement in the art of the medal" on the Portuguese artist Helder Batisra at ceremonies in February. Receiving the award in person, Mr. Batista reflected on his life as sculptor and medallist, which lent additional meaning to a major retrospective exhibit of his work that opened at the ANS on February 14. The Saltus Meeting was also the occasion for the annual Stephen K. Scher Lecture, featuring Richard Brilliant, Anna S. Garbendian, Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. The following month, the public returned to the ANS lecture hall to celebrate the awarding of the 1998 Archer M. Huntington Medal to Stanislaw Suchodolski, Professor in the Institute for Archaeology and Ethnology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, who was accompanied by his wife, Ewa Suchodolski. Among dignitaries honoring the first Pole to receive this coveted award "for distinguished numismatic scholarship" were His Excellency, Eugeniusz Wyzner, Polish Ambassador to the United Nations, and Prof. Felix Gross, President of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in America. Prof. Suchodolski concluded the ceremonial afternoon by delivering the 1998 Margaret Thompson Memorial Lecture on "Coin Finds and Archaeological Contexts: A Tentative Classification."

In April the Society further strengthened its commitment to the study of United States numismatics with the inaugural Groves Forum in American Numismatics. The featured speaker was Dr. Philip L. Mossman who also serves as Editor of The Colonial Newsletter, the prestigious journal donated to the ANS in 1997 by James C. Spilman, President of the Colonial Newsletter Foundation. Three issues of CNL are published each year under the guidance of Dr. Mossman and Assistant Editors Gary Trudgen and Michael Hodder. Mr. Spilman serves as Editor Emeritus. In September Frank L. Holt, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston, delivered the first annual Harry W. Fowler Memorial Lecture on "Every Coin a Mystery: The Quest fo Ancient Bactria." This lecture series, devoted to the coinages of ancient Greece and Rome, has been endowed by Emily Tucker Fowler and members of the Fowler family in honor of Harry W Fowler who served as ANS President from 1984 through 1990 and whose important collection of ancient Bactriar coins was bequeathed to the ANS following his death in 1994. The inauguration of new public programs finds a rich complement in the celebration this past year of the twentieth anniversary of the David M. Bullowa Memoria Conference, underwritten by annual gifts from Catherine Bullowa-Moore. At the 1998 Bullowa Conference, three alumni of the 1997 ANS Graduate Seminar in Numismatics, John C. Hansen of the University of North Carolina, Carlos Norena of the University of Pennsylvania, and Joel Allen of Yale University presented papers based on their Seminar research projects.

To this impressive list of public programs may be added several special interest conferences at the ANS as well as outreach efforts at places distant from our headquarters. In November the third of what is becoming an annual "Arab-Byzantine Forum" took place at the Society under the leadership of Michael Bates, ANS Curator of Islamic Coins. He also organized two other informal workshops during the year—one on "Chinese Cast Coins" in February followed by "Coinages of the Eastern Mediterranean Lands in the Era of the Crusades" in May. Dr. Bates also represented the ANS at the MESA annual meeting held in San Francisco last November where he chaired one session, spoke at another, and hosted an ANS reception. Likewise, ANS Chief Curator William Metcalf hosted the Society's reception for seminar alumni and friends at the AJA/APA meetings in Chicago in late December; and in May, Dr. Stahl represented the Society at the 33rd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI, taking part in two sessions either sponsored or co-sponsored by the ANS, and hosting the Society's annual reception. In September at the close of the period under review, three staff members joined five other speakers at a conference at the University of California, Berkeley, on "Thracian Numismatics and Hoard Objects," co-sponsored by the ANS and the San Francisco Ancient Numismatic Society. Our heartfelt thanks go to our west coast members for according us this excellent outreach opportunity.

The forty-sixth annual Graduate Seminar in Numismatics provided advanced instruction in numismatic methodology and research techniques to one foreign and eleven American students. Funding for this important educational program is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Eric P. Newman of St. Louis. We are indebted to this year's Visiting Scholar, Christopher Howgego of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for his able assistance in overseeing the work of the students and for his trilogy of lectures on "Coins and Culture." Past members of the Seminar were invited last year to join a newly formed Alumni Association. At an organizational meeting in December, Jane DeRose Evans of Temple University was elected President, and efforts are ongoing to develop programs and projects of interest to this signal group of humanists, many of whom have gained prominence in the academic and business communities. One such alumna, Prof. Karen E. Ros of Indiana University, has been awarded the Society's Fellowship in Roman Studies for 1998/9 enabling her to work at the ANS in furtherance of her study of Roman adventus and profectio coins. The 1997/8 Shaykh Hamad Al-Thani Fellowship in Islamic Numismatics was awarded to Roxani Margariti, a graduate student at Princeton University. During the past year, she devoted considerable time to cataloguing the coins from the John J. Slocum collection received by the Society as a gift from his son, John J. Slocum, Jr., late last year. The senior Slocum, who died in 1997, had been a member of the Society's Council for 19 years until his retirement in 1993.

With generous funding from the Harry Bass Foundation, the Library staff has been busily engaged this past year in overseeing conversion of the ANS card catalogue to machine readable format. By the end of the year, nearly 40,000 records had been converted with the entire project scheduled for completion by the end of 1999. The availability of the computerized catalogue, which eventually will be mounted at the Society's website, will greatly facilitate access to the ANS Library holdings while also serving as an essential bibliographic tool for the discipline. Harry Bass, both personally in his lifetime, and through the foundations he created to carry on his work, has assured that internet-enabled individuals throughout the world will have ready access to the collections and library of the ANS as well as to most of the printed literature in the discipline published over the past 50 years and more. We are proud to share in this legacy.

The Society continues to benefit from the generosity of its members and friends. It is a pleasure to report that Dr. Arnold-Peter Weiss of Barrington, RI, a member of our governing Council, has been named a Benefactor of the Society in recognition of his gifts aggregating over $200,000. To our list of Patrons, at the $50,000 level, has been added ANS Fellow Herman Miller of New York, a member since 1971; and named as Sponsors of the Society for reaching the $10,000 plateau during the past year are the Arete Foundation of Philadelphia, PA and John-Platt Enterprises, Inc. of New York. The Society is truly grateful to these generous supporters. As well, we appreciate the many individual, corporate, and foundation donors recorded herein, whose support for our core programs, for our growing collections, and for special projects and events is essential to our growth and well-being.

To our list of Corresponding Members, we added three foreign scholars of distinction during the past year to this honorary class of membership: Michael Alram, Curator in the Munzkabinett, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the Visiting Scholar for the 1997 ANS Graduate Seminar; Rika Gyselen, a research scholar at the French Centre National de La Recherche Scientifique, well known for her contributions to Sasanian numismatics; and Giovanni Gorini, Professor at the University of Padua and a member of the International Numismatic Commission. Prof. Gorini was the Visiting Scholar for the 1994 ANS Graduate Seminar. During the past year the Society's Council elected ten new Fellows to the list of voting members of the ANS: Curtis Clay, Oak Park, IL; Jane DeRose Evans, Philadelphia, PA; Richard Giedroyc, Sidney, OH; Ruth Mazo Karras, Philadelphia, PA; Jonathan K. Kern, Lexington, KY; Frank L. Kovacs, San Mateo, CA; Catherine C. Lorber, Woodland Hills, CA; Joseph Veach Noble, Maplewood, NJ; Harriet Schwartz-Crew, Acton, MA; and George U. Wyper, New York, NY The Society is pleased to thus acknowledge the support of the ANS and the dedication to the discipline provided by these individuals.

On November 18, 1997, the California Superior Court in Los Angeles ruled that the ANS is the legal owner of 38 early U.S. large cents dating from 1793 to 1814, then in the possession of Roy E. Naftzger, Jr., of Beverly Hills, CA. In addition, the ruling awarded the Society $229,500 in damages for the value of 20 U.S. cents belonging the ANS which Naftzger had previously possessed and sold. The court ruled that Naftzger never had title to these 58 coins which had been donated to the ANS in 1946 and were among the 129 coins donated to the ANS by George H. Clapp which had been removed from the collection in a substitution scheme by Dr. William H. Sheldon about 1950. The suit was filed by Naftzger against the ANS in 1993 and some issues were determined by the California Court of Appeals in San Francisco in 1996. The Superior Court decision is currently on appeal. A number of the 129 coins originally taken have been returned to the ANS since February 1991 when the Society made public the information provided to it by numismatic expert Delmar Bland. A listing of the coins still missing, together with enlarged photographs, is available on the Society's website and will be provided to individuals on request. The return of all the stolen Clapp cents is being sought by the ANS, which has both a moral and a legal obligation to safeguard its treasures for the benefit of the public.

Finally, it was with a mixed sense of regret and satisfaction that I announced to the Society's Annual Meeting on October 24th my intention to resign as the Society's President at the end of my current term, in October 1999. As I said then, my reasons involve my concern—and regret—that, even with frequent visits to New York from Washington, where I live, I could not provide the weekly, even daily on-site attention that will be essential for the Society's move to 140 William Street. In my judgment, the Society must have as its chairman someone from the New York area who can oversee the planning, architecture, exhibit design, and construction of the new building, the transfer of the collections, the disposal of the Society's current quarters at Audubon Terrace, and lead the fundraising effort to support the move itself. My satisfaction comes from the achievement of a number of important objectives over the past five years. One is, of course, the acquisition of the Society's new home at William Street. Another is the reorganization and re-definition of the role of the Society's governing Council, the creation of a new and effective Council committee structure, the election of newer, younger members to the Council, and a significant expansion of the Society's colloquia, lecture, and outreach programs, several of which are mentioned above.

For my part, my own support for the Society remains undiminished. I shall continue to do everything I can to assist its move, and I look forward to continuing as an active Council member. I also look forward to working with a new President whose principal tasks, as I see them, will be to provide leadership for the move to William Street and the fundraising effort that will allow the Society to flourish at our new location.

We are on the threshold of a new era for the ANS. Each of us has a stake in what I deeply believe promises to be a very, very bright future.

ARTHUR A. HOUGHTON