Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> My source is a book about the history of numbers/numerals:
> _Menninger, Karl A., Number Words and Number Symbols, ...tr. by
> Paul Broneer from the rev. German Ed._ MIT Press, 1969. I do not
> recall the page nor chapter, but there is an illustration. Btw,
> there is another, better-known Karl Menninger; this is not [he].
>
> Btw, Googling on [history numbers book] seems fruitless; I was
> probably at the 100th hit and still hadn't found this. The book is
> in our local library's (Minuteman) catalog.
>
> This book did have some commentary about the use of letters as
> numerals, but I no longer recall how much. Some vandal had removed
> all the pages dealing with Jewish numbers in our local library's
> copy; of course, I don't know why.

It's been reprinted by Dover -- I don't know whether it's still
available.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...