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Merchants' Cost And Price Marks


All merchants use private cipher marks to note cost or selling price of

goods. The cipher is usually made up from some short word or sentence of

nine or ten letters, as:



C O R N E L I U S, A

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0



Five dollars, according to this key, would be eaa. But generally an

extra letter is used to prevent repeating the mark for 0. If the sign

for a second 0 in this case were y, we would have eay instead of eaa.



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