In the great comic tradition of Groucho Marx, I offer you the Mint Statistics secret word, “Reconciliations.”

If a quacking duck drops from the ceiling everytime the word shows up in this column, don’t be alarmed. He’s harmless.

Unfortunately, unlike the Marx gameshow, we won’t be giving away any money, or even a John Marshall Coin & Chronicles Set – though plenty are still available, and would make a fine Christmas gift for somebody.

Anyway, back to our word of the day. As it relates to our boxes, reconciliations is a term the Mint uses to explain odd sales figures behavior.

Take, for example, the 2005 uncirculated set numbers for this week. If you follow Mint Statistics issue by issue you’ll note that the number of 2005 uncirculated set sales actually dropped precipitously this week, going from 1,176,554 to 1,115,000.

You might ask, how is this possible? Good question. It has to do with reconciliations, which refer to those sales where say a customer’s credit card is rejected or the shipping address given is wrong, and the order is cancelled. Those cancellations are subtracted by these reconciliation numbers.

Oops. There’s that word again.

Anyway, that’s the reason for the discrepancy, which is important considering the recent order limits on the sets imposed by the Mint. If you’ve been living in a cave the past few months, you may not have heard that orders are now limited to 10 per household, per order and that’s the way it’s going to be until the sets sell out.

According to the Mint, this was done to ensure fair and equitable distribution of the sets, which seems reasonable to me.

Have you ever seen those commercials where the guy is trying to open what he thinks is his car with a hanger and tries to break open the window with a rock, and another guy comes along and says, “What are you doing to my car?” I recently experienced something similar when it was pointed out to me that we had printed the same Item column twice in the Nov. 15 issue. Missing was the Coin Clinic column. Look for Coin Clinic’s return this week. I know I will.

Have a question? E-mail me at peter.lindblad@fwpubs.com.

* Figures in boxes below compiled on Nov. 8.