Woytek 2022a, p. 379-380: "Among the momentous manuscript volumes in Eckhel’s hand preserved in Vienna, three books in modest, but durable half-leather bindings, whose boards are covered in 18th century monochrome (red or brown) marbled paper, stand out because of their in-folio format (archives nos. 79–81). Stylistically, their bindings are very similar to that of the quarto notebook no. 7, described above. These three folio notebooks – highly diverse in character between themselves – are dedicated to three different classes of ancient coins. All are characterised by more or less generous right- or left-hand margins left blank for additions and corrections; this is a feature they share with the quarto notebooks nos. 5–7, incidentally. No. 79 contains notes on the autonomous and Roman provincial coinage of cities of the Mediterranean in strictly alphabetical order (from Aba to Zilia), mostly based on the numismatic literature, and to a much lesser extent on collections. Entries for several different cities may be found on the same page, but Eckhel left room between entries that allowed him to add information subsequently, which he did assiduously, evidently over a certain period of time.61 The information contained in this notebook is basic, often not very detailed, and a far cry from what was published in the Doctrina from 1792 onwards. Its concise nature may be exemplified through the first entry, for the city of Aba in Caria (see fig. 2): it comprises only two manuscript lines, with reference to two coins of that city published by Joseph Pellerin in 1767, whereas the passage on Aba in volume 2 of the Doctrina occupies as many as 25 lines of one column of printed text. The second entry of the notebook’s first page, on Abacaenum in Sicily, comprises two later additions in which Eckhel notes specimens of this city viewed by him in the collections of Dominique Magnan (1731–1796) and Abbé Bertrand Capmartin de Chaupy (1720–1798) during his stay in Rome in 1772/1773; other references to the Chaupy collection are to be found in the volume as well. Secondary notes (partly in somewhat darker ink) added gradually to the entries on several cities throughout the manuscript refer to coins published in Eckhel’s Numi veteres anecdoti of 1775. These additions provide definitive termini ante for the start of this large manuscript notebook: when the original entries in volume no. 79 were written, Eckhel did not yet have information on the coins that he saw in Rome in 1772/1773 or that he published in 1775. This dating agrees with a secondary entry that Eckhel inserted for the coinage of Scodra, since it refers to coin images sent to him by his correspondent Giacomo Gradenigo (1721–1796) in the autumn of 1776. Hence, no. 79 must be an early notebook, almost certainly commenced by Eckhel before he left for Italy in August 1772, which he possibly used during his work in Italian collections and which he continued to add to after 1775. The latest terminus that I have been able to determine for the active use of this notebook is the existence of (the manuscript of ?) Eckhel’s Catalogus of the imperial coin collection, published in print in 1779, to which he refers. To the left of most of the city names in this notebook, small crosses were added by Eckhel subsequently – presumably indicating that the information in the respective entry had been used in (or transferred to) another context. Whether the notes in this notebook may be identified as the early “commentarii nulla tum adhuc lege atque ordine” that Eckhel prepared just for himself, as he wrote in 1786, is not sufficiently clear.
