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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 792474, member: 66&quot;]To be more specific about Conder, his name was James Conder and he was a draper who lived in the city of Ipswich in the county of Suffolk, England.&nbsp; He also issued his own tokens around 1795.&nbsp; Due to the lack of good regal coinage for circulation a tremendous number of privately issued tokens were produced for circulation during the 1787 to 1800 period.&nbsp; With so many different varieties being available the collecting of these tokens became a popular pastime.&nbsp; Two or three different people produced catalogs of the available tokens during this period.&nbsp; Conder was not the first but he produced two editions of his book, one in 1795 and a second edition in 1798.&nbsp; Although it wasn&#039;t the first, it was probably the most comprehensive and it became the standard reference for these tokens from 1798 until the Atkins reference was published in 1890.&nbsp; (How they used the book I&#039;ll never know.&nbsp; No pictures, and since many issues used multiple dies of the same design you would have the design described for the first variety and then a bunch more afterwards each listed as &quot;Another, differently arranged&quot;.)&nbsp; Since the tokens were collected by the numbers in his reference they became known as Conder tokens on this side of the Atlantic.&nbsp; (In England they are still referred to as 18th century provincial tokens.)</p><p><br /></p><p>Now as to what a &quot;draper&quot; is I&#039;m afraid I&#039;m not sure.&nbsp; I have seen it referred to as someone who made and sold draperies, but considering the number of &quot;drapers&quot; who issued tokens and the number of references I have seen to Drapers it would seem to require about 10% of the population would be dealing in draperies.&nbsp; I seriously doubt if any but the very wealthy had any use for draperies, so they would not have need that many dealers in them.&nbsp; I suspect the term actually means someone who deals in cloth or drygoods, and mainly cloth for clothing.&nbsp; (Dealers in cloth for sails had a different name.)&nbsp; Considering that England was a major supplier/exporter of cloth at the time, especially wool cloth, this would make sense.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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