The Monthly Coin Journals (月刊コインジャーナル) have hit Canadian soil.
The boxes were 68.6 kg total! Monstrously huge. They are now in possession of Detchibe, who has graciously taken some photos for us:
Coin Journal issues we received:
1982-12
1983-01
1983-06
1984 5 issues
1985 10 issues
1986 full run
1987 full run
1988 full run
1989 full run
1990 full run
1991 full run
1994 1-6, 8-12
Thank you so much to everyone who donated, with a special thanks to the International Arcade Museum Library Inc and D. Yu who both stepped up with remarkable donations. 18 donors total contributed to make this happen. Thank you to Sudden_Desu who handled everything on the Japan side and put up with us being many many timezones away.
As I'm buried in the paperwork and planning of this project, I will leave it to other historians to further opine on the importance of these magazines and the impact they might have. I am incredibly excited to start working through them as they are scanned. I think there will be a wonderful cascade of revelations, insights, and wiki corrections as the arcade and videogame communities start digesting them.
Thank you for trusting us on this. I'm relieved this has worked out, and I'm grateful for everyone who contributed. Please feel free to get involved with more projects at Gaming Alexandria! And here's a link to our Discord. My username is cait001.
Scanning plan
Scanning will take a minimum 300+ hours, so best be patient. This will be an extended project for sure. If you want to get updates I recommend following Detchibe on BlueSky, or follow their Internet Archive account. (you can also reach them via their Ko-fi account. They will certainly need beverages and encouragement over the next year of work.)
The current plan is to receive a loan of a new scanner with a 2mm edge, one that is made for scanning books. Hopefully this will come in by the end of June. Normally with mass preservation it is the time of the people scanning that is the limiting factor, and so scanning is done destructively. But these Coin Journal issues will end up in the archives of the International Arcade Museum Library and so need to be scanned one page at a time. This vastly increases the time and work required to scan each, so please be patient.
Financials:
The total cost on the Japan side was ¥640,837. Total bids of ¥535,387 plus overseas shipping of
¥105,450. My original estimates were just north of ¥800,000.
There is a lot of messy conversion between JPY, CAD, and USD funds with each financial product taking their service charges and skimming a few points on any conversion, as they all tend to do. Converting to USD though, here's a quickie summary:
$4,734.60 USD total cost
$5,163.08 USD net donations received (with our matching donor providing $2,367.30 of that)
$428.48 USD remains to get rolled into the next batch of arcade magazines
We don't have any final bill for duty charges, but I called UPS today and they said the 3 boxes would only incur charges of under $14 CAD each, or $30.66 USD total. That's pretty great, especially considering I was just hit with a $250 CAD import/duty bill for a package from the USA with a declared value of $300 USD. (mind you, it's never safe to entirely trust UPS...)
