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Collecting ancient coins in the old days


Valentinian

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Some of us are relatively new to collecting ancient coins, and others of us have been at it for many years. Maybe you think ancient coin prices have gone up a lot and wish you were collecting long ago, but you are actually--right now--in the golden age for collecting ancient coins. For some of why that's true, look at my description of what collecting was like for me in the "old days" before the internet. 
http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/olddays.html

If you've been collecting since before the internet, I'd love to hear your thoughts about collecting in the old days and how collecting has changed. 

 

Edited by Valentinian
added tags for Roman, Greek, Byzantine, etc.
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12 minutes ago, Valentinian said:

Some of us are relatively new to collecting ancient coins, and others of us have been at it for many years. Maybe you think ancient coin prices have gone up a lot and wish you were collecting long ago, but you are actually--right now--in the golden age for collecting ancient coins. For some of why that's true, look at my description of what collecting was like for me in the "old days" before the internet. 
http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/olddays.html

If you've been collecting since before the internet, I'd love to hear your thoughts about collecting in the old days and how collecting has changed. 

 

Excellent web page. I have only been collecting for 1 year so did not really consider the trials and tribulations you and others went through to satisfy your passion.

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I've only recently (about 3 years ago) started collecting ancients, but I do remember as a kid going through the coin buckets at gem shows my parents dragged me to. They were 25 cents a coin and my parents would give me a few dollars to shut me up. I went through every single coin in those buckets...

I also remember participating in phone auctions for other collectibles. I would receive the list in the mail and call in my bids. The day of the auction I kept having to retry because the guy's number would be busy.

One advantage of the shows I attended (not for coins) was that there was a high standard deviation in the sellers' prices. Not everyone was aware what others were asking, so sometimes great bargains could be had. Today everyone checks ACSearch and CoinArchives - both buyers and sellers.

Nowadays, I check some of my favorite sellers several times a day. I've chatted with them on when they most often list new coins and make a special attempt then. Some of the best coins sell out in minutes. 🙂 

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I've been collecting for almost exactly 20 years. To me those early years were the golden days compared to today both in terms of supply and community - tons of finders selling good quality coins on eBay, as well as dealers such as a few fondly remembered names such as AAH (Ancient Auction House) and Slavey (Slavey Petrov the forger I believe!), etc. In those early days there were still lots of dealers with their own web sites, before they all migrated to VCoins. Bargains and rarities to be had if you could hunt them down.

FORVM was super active back then with Barry Murphy and Curtis Clay both posting and helping regularly, plus there was ancients.info where Zach Beasley (Beast Coins) would usually be seen, and the Moneta-L list was still frequented by collectors as well as dealers.

Of course it was easier to find things of interest when you are starting out, but the supply really was very different than today. I remember on one day receiving coins in the mail from 6 different countries! There were lots of foreign sellers back then who would either not speak english and/or not accept PayPal, so buying coins often entailed sending off a fistful of Euros obtained from the bank, or a Western Union transfer on occasion. I often had to communicate by email using Google translate, which was pretty poor back then (but still a game changer and amazing to have)... Due to the poor quality translation my process was to translate to target language, then back into English to see if it was still intelligible, and if not simplify and iterate!

 

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I've read your webpage @Valentinian and was wondering how you could know my collector's life so well (I've been collecting for 50 years - 40 years of ancient coins collecting). Except I live in France and we used to have more coin clubs and coinshows, everything was the same back then. I remember getting my first auction catalog in the mail in 1982, not knowing how they had spotted me as a potential customer, and feeling like I were a "happy few" to get it free !

I also remember how long it took to get someone on the phone for being answered the item had been already sold ten times : very frustrating

Thanks for the revival of the good ol' days !!

Q

Edited by Qcumbor
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A wonderful piece, @Valentinian! I've been actively collecting ancient coins only since 2017, after buying them very sporadically in the decade before that. But I collected inexpensive British coins beginning in elementary school in the mid-1960s (at local coin shops in New York City and from circulation on family trips to British islands in the Caribbean). I also collected British historical/commemorative medals beginning in the early 1980s (when I was in my mid-20s, single, and gainfully employed) from catalogs, British mail auctions held by Spink, Baldwin's, and Bonhams, and stores here in NYC like the Stack's second floor galleries. A visit to London in 1986 with a friend was paradise for me. I spent one entire afternoon at Seaby's looking at tray after tray of British gold coins and silver crowns, to the incredible boredom of my traveling companion!  It was also in the early 1980s when I began collecting antiquities at stores like Harmer, Rooke (which also dealt in coins) and Royal Athena Galleries. (Which, as I remember, was then selling gold solidi for about $100-$200 each. I wish I had bought some!)

I can very strongly relate to what you've written about buying from largely unillustrated catalogs by mail before the Internet, and about the amazing stuff that was available on Ebay in the late 1990s, even though I was buying only British coins and medals back then. 

Speaking of prices, here are some of the ancient coin pages -- which I ignored at the time, unfortunately -- from a catalog I received in the mail in 1971 (when I was still in high school) from Manfra, Tordella, and Brooks, a New York City coin dealer better known as a dealer in precious metals/bullion and foreign currency. (I believe it still exists under the name MTB Metals, but no longer deals in coins on the side.) Note the complete absence of illustrations. Inconceivable now, but pretty standard back then. (Parenthetically, the common absence of published illustrations for the substantial majority of ancient and other coins sold in the 1970s and earlier, whether at auction or at retail -- particularly the more common and less expensive types -- underlines the absurdity of expecting people to be able to document the pedigree of their ancient coins to a date before the 1970 UNESCO Convention. Even if one has original invoices from that era, they are rarely specific enough to tie them to a particular specimen.) 

Note also the surprising number of coins for sale described as VG or even G. Fair warning, I guess! 

image.jpeg.72e8c97030e60c113e1bd03bf15251ff.jpeg

image.jpeg.3e839f75eecb126fc10bc34d1713398c.jpeg

 

Edited by DonnaML
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I too have a similar history to both @Qcumbor and @Valentinian I have been collecting for over 50 years and there are many things I remember not to fondly about that period of time. One thing I had to do was buy issues of magazines and newspapers like Coin World (an excellent coin newspaper by the way but for ancients not so much) just to get the adds. Then I would contact the dealer and hopefully have him send me a list. Once getting the list I would excitedly look through it and find coins that I wanted phone him up (which usually cost me more than $10 a call back in the 1980's) just to find out that just about every coin I like was gone. Then there would be a mad dash just to get anything...... of course in the back of my mind  I am thinking "If I don't get anything will he keep sending me catalogues." One of the things that @Valentinian mentions is the overhead of producing these lists. That meant that many lower value coins were overpriced by quite a bit in order to justify their place in a list. So "Oh look a Constantine II Ae 3 Aquileia mint in VF virtually no silvering only a hundred dollars. Must buy. Otherwise they probably will not send me another FPL". 

Xconjnr28.jpg.efbeaa891fc93d532b5266e5a94a2a48.jpg

 I live in the Mountain Standard Time zone. This meant that I could not deal with most dealers on the east coast, because by the time I got home from work, they were closed.

  Phoning Europe was even worse about $25 dollars a call, and staying up past midnight to call. As I had to be at work at 7 AM this meant a night of virtually noo sleep. With FPLs see situation above, but possibly worse. 

  Once in a while I would get lucky. I got this guy. 

Constantine I Ae siliqus 336-337 AD Obv Head of Constantine I right eyes looking up to God. Rv Victory advancing left RIC 105 2.41 grms 19 mm Photo by W. Hansenconmag311.jpg.8455e0130fc6c1f8c5a2ea1feba60f70.jpg

In Edmonton there was a store called Mikes that only sold magazines and newspapers some of which were numismatically orientated. For a while Stanley Gibbons a well respected London firm that specialized in stamps opened up a numismatic branch which after a few years cratered. This coin was one of the coins I found in their FPL's. 

Edited by kapphnwn
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The link posted by Valentinian is right on 😉. I've been an avid coin collector for over 60 years & opened a business "Eastside Coins & Antiques" in 1980 in Rochester, NY. I combined coins with antiques because dealing in coins alone was not profitable 😒. In those days coin collecting was still in it's infancy & was not nearly as popular as stamp collecting. When it became known that I was a dealer I started receiving free auction catalogs & price lists from all the major players & built an impressive library with all that material 😊. U.S. & world coins carried the market back then & very few Americans collected ancient coins. If you went to a coin show in the 70s & 80s you might find 2 dealers out of 50 that had some ancient or medieval coins for sale. On the other hand, the market for antiques was at it's peak & was very popular. Researching & determining the value of ancient coins before the internet was difficult & involved some guesswork because reliable literature was rare. We can all thank David R. Sear for the pioneering work he did on ancient coins before the internet revolutionized the hobby. Pictured below is one of the ads I ran in a neighborhood newspaper. BTW, I still own that coin 😂.

IMG_0773.JPG.4b5178afed51720ced1e1b0d837b3781.JPG

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An interesting thread, maybe I can contribute my own recollections.  I started collecting ancients in the early 90s, as a college undergraduate.  The local coin shop had some ancients in its stock (including some of the first batch of LRBs and Provincials to come out of former Yugoslavia etc. following the end of Eastern European Communism).  This was a couple of years before the World Wide Web hit- the Internet was starting to become popular, but it was mostly for email, or else Usenet (including the rec.collecting.coins group).  Without the Web-based resources, finding information on coins was a lot harder.  I spent a lot of time looking for hard-to-find numismatic references via booksellers or publishers.  My first ancient-specific reference was Sear's Roman Coins and Their Values (4th edition, the last one-volume version), which the local coin shop special-ordered for me.  I picked up Mitchiner's Oriental Coins and Their Values Volume 1: Ancient and Classical World (invaluable for India and Central Asia) in '96- I don't remember where I ordered it from, but it definitely came in the mail.  I also remember getting paper fixed-price lists and auction catalogues- I remember Alex G. Malloy, Antioch Associates (which sold Lindgren's collection), and others.  I think it was in '98 that a friend introduced me to a website called eBay, and I spent a lot of time (and dollars) there.  Good times, good times...

But overall I'd have to say that we have it better today.  It's just so much easier to find information about coins, and to find dealers selling the coins you're interested in.  The past is a fun place to visit, but I'd still prefer to live in the present.

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15 hours ago, Valentinian said:

If you've been collecting since before the internet, I'd love to hear your thoughts about collecting in the old days and how collecting has changed.

 

 

The biggest change for me is the internet - and with it the chance to buy coins from dealers and auction houses worldwide. This, of course, meant a significant shift from local trading to virtual trading. With all its advantages and disadvantages.

More than 30 years ago, just 4 dealers in the Stuttgart region (Germany) were accessible and close by for me. It was like a birthday when I once visited friends in Munich and I could visit the dealers there. 

What I remember most positively from that time was the personal contact. I had a regular coin dealer in Tübingen from whom I bought almost all my coins. Today, a purchase is often an anonymous mouse click. But back then, you didn't just buy a coin locally. First you had to go through the 10 or 20 coin drawers and look at one coin after the other. They thought 10 times about buying a coin and then made a decision at some point. But you didn't just get the coin - the coin dealer gave you great information about it. So a visit to the shop often lasted 2-3 hours... sometimes even longer.

However, I only had this positive experience with "my" coin dealer from Tübingen. I also associate with this time that many local dealers were "sitting on a high horse". When I visited one of the dealers in Stuttgart or Munich (I was about 20 years young at the time), I was often not even noticed in the shop. When it was my turn, they often looked at me - the young man - disparagingly. When I asked for Roman coins, I often got the answer that they only had high-quality coins and nothing cheap. If I then said yes, that I would like to see some - they would only give me the drawers with inferior goods. It was not uncommon for me to leave a shop annoyed. In short - what I also remember is that many shops and traders were very "elitist" and also very arrogant. 

In general, it was a time when - in my experience - younger collectors and/or new collectors were treated very disparagingly for a while. It was a conspiratorial circle of coin collectors - they knew each other - they were among themselves - and newcomers or young adults did not have an easy time getting in in the 80s. This will remain a negative memory for me. Of course, I don't know if that was only the case here in Germany or also in other countries. 

 

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30 minutes ago, Prieure de Sion said:

However, I only had this positive experience with "my" coin dealer from Tübingen. I also associate with this time that many local dealers were "sitting on a high horse". When I visited one of the dealers in Stuttgart or Munich (I was about 20 years young at the time), I was often not even noticed in the shop. When it was my turn, they often looked at me - the young man - disparagingly. When I asked for Roman coins, I often got the answer that they only had high-quality coins and nothing cheap. If I then said yes, that I would like to see some - they would only give me the drawers with inferior goods. It was not uncommon for me to leave a shop annoyed. In short - what I also remember is that many shops and traders were very "elitist" and also very arrogant. 

I fully agree to this statement. Visiting the coindealers in Paris when I was younger, I was often regarded as an intruder or someone they would waste their time with. Some others were/are very friendly, on the contrary, especially in Lyon and Bourg en Bresse.

Q

Edited by Qcumbor
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My only experience of physically buying coins in Germany in the "old days" turned out to be positive. In 1969 I was a 20 year old soldier stationed in Germany, who looked more like a 16 year old 🙄. I decided to take 2 weeks leave in the cosmopolitan city of Frankfurt am Main. While wandering around on my 3rd day I walked into a small coin shop. The owner greeted me & asked if he could help me & I answered back in my broken German that I was just looking. With a smirk he quickly asked if I was an American soldier, my haircut & eye glasses were a sure giveaway, so I said yes. American soldiers were generally not greeted with open arms & were perceived to be young & stupid but free spending with their pay (we were paid in cash). With that in mind & the little German that I could speak he let me browse. As it turned out, he knew about as much English as I did German & we were able to communicate effectively 😊. I spotted a rare crown from Zanzibar, a silver 1 ryal from 1882, & asked to see it. He was very surprised I asked to see it & asked me if I knew it was rare, rather than playing stupid I said yes 🤔. He then quoted me the price of 200 DM, about $50 American. I then asked to see a choice Macedonian tetradrachm with Hercules on the obverse & a seated Zeus on the reverse. He said if I take the Zanzibar crown he'd sell me the Tet for 140 DM, about $35 American 😲. I eagerly handed him 340 DM & walked away with a big grin on my face 😁.

Edited by Al Kowsky
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5 hours ago, Prieure de Sion said:

 

 

I also associate with this time that many local dealers were "sitting on a high horse". When I visited one of the dealers in Stuttgart or Munich (I was about 20 years young at the time), I was often not even noticed in the shop. When it was my turn, they often looked at me - the young man - disparagingly. When I asked for Roman coins, I often got the answer that they only had high-quality coins and nothing cheap. If I then said yes, that I would like to see some - they would only give me the drawers with inferior goods. It was not uncommon for me to leave a shop annoyed. In short - what I also remember is that many shops and traders were very "elitist" and also very arrogant. 

In general, it was a time when - in my experience - younger collectors and/or new collectors were treated very disparagingly for a while. It was a conspiratorial circle of coin collectors - they knew each other - they were among themselves - and newcomers or young adults did not have an easy time getting in in the 80s. This will remain a negative memory for me. Of course, I don't know if that was only the case here in Germany or also in other countries. 

 

Same here but back in the 90s and early 2000s at some coin shows. I still don't understand this type of attitude, it's like they don't even want to sell anything. Arrogance and snobbery is not just annoying but highly counterproductive.

Edited by seth77
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3 hours ago, seth77 said:

Same here but back in the 90s and early 2000s at some coin shows. I still don't understand this type of attitude, it's like they don't even want to sell anything. Arrogance and snobbery is not just annoying but highly counterproductive.

I can only speak for myself, but back then I didn't have the look of someone going to spend a lot of money. I guess I still don't have the right look, but what the heck, I can spend my euros with someone who will appreciate them, no problem !

Q

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The biggest change came with the internet.  In the old days it was buying in person (either a shop or show) or paper catalogs.  I issued catalogs from the late 80's up to 1999.  By then the internet had really taken off and had replaced catalogs.  I do miss paper lists.  Half the fun of collecting was getting the catalogs in the mail (though producing them was expensive and a lot of work).  And pricing.  Its very odd that many types back then were uber cheap and now very expensive, but also the other direction.  And of course hoards come and go.  In the mid 80's there was a hoard of mint state Constantius Gallus Centenionalii.  They were so common at shows and in lists that I wouldnt handle them.  They averaged about $20-25 at the time, I think the same would be about $150 now.  Oh yea.  I remember the hoard of Julius Caesar Aureii, They were about $1,00 at the time, now they are selling $10,000.  

We've see a lot of changes.  I cant imagine what may come in the future!

IMG_6091.JPG

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These fascinating posts make me feel like a novice collector. My happy childhood ‘old’ coins collecting lived on knowing other interested boys (always boys). Since moving to a city, visiting a local collector club, and later being shown humble stocks by shop dealers, I felt a parallel world of serious collectors with their secret membership and language. The world I have never belonged. Such a parallel world might be true - a hint is the new Roma Reward Membership, Gold at £50,000 over a year; Premier at £100,000. There must be a relatively small circle of such collectors who know each other and may have their tradition of mutual introductions or recommendations. As for dealers, there is no point to bend over backwards to strangers like me. Thank you, Internet!

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On 5/22/2023 at 8:33 PM, DonnaML said:

I spent one entire afternoon at Seaby's looking at tray after tray of British gold coins and silver crowns, to the incredible boredom of my traveling companion! 

I thought there was always a purposefully planned shoe shop next to the coin shop 🙂
I tend to finish sooner than my wife.
 

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5 minutes ago, Rand said:

I thought there was always a purposefully planned shoe shop next to the coin shop 🙂
I tend to finish sooner than my wife.
 

There are plenty of shoe stores in New York; I didn't need to go to England for that!  I'm afraid that the person I was with wasn't either a shoe person or a coin person. Too bad that Seaby's isn't around anymore. Unlike some other people's experiences when they were young, the staff at Seaby's weren't dismissive of me at all. Perhaps it's the difference between being 30 (which I was at the time) and being only 20.

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14 hours ago, Rand said:

I thought there was always a purposefully planned shoe shop next to the coin shop 🙂
I tend to finish sooner than my wife.
 

I'm also a sneakerhead so if they'd put a coin shop next to a sneaker shop that has Nike Air Max, AF1 or Dunks I'd be there all day and more.

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I remember the early days of the internet. These were the days when the site was an actual auction site, not a bunch of "Buy it Nows" There were many great coins on offer and they were very inexpensive. This was back around the time of  the Millenium I remember during one auction being hosted by AAH (Ancient Auction House) I bought these three coins.

Trajan Ar Denarius 112-113 AD ALIM ITAL RIC 243Xtrajand38.jpeg.4d114b57b3f5a71986cd31cbf8b00060.jpeg

Severus Alexander Ar Denarius  232 AD IOVI PROPVGBATORI RIC 239Xsevalexd9.jpg.1e615042c1bd7bd4ee7c309450c4bcd3.jpg

Severus Alexander Ar Denarius  Victory Inscribing VOT X on shield RIC 219 NONE OF THESE ARE MY COINS ANYMORE

Xsevalexd10.jpg.23733c9c191aacbfdd2f7a00f672a2f6.jpg

Paid just over $100 US for the three. Shipping was like $10. Essentially EBay ended most dealer FPLs. It also meant that many of my $100 coins were no longer $100 coins.

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Sorry to have missed most of this thread.  A very cool topic.  Someone here started one, several months ago, about when and how people got into the hobby.  Wish I could find it.

Except, Well, Fine, Okay.  Here's more than anyone is likely to need.

I go back to the late '60's, when, for American, there was still stuff to be found in change from the store.  My big brother had a brilliant 1951 Franklin half.  

Segue to the early 1970's, and the one and only coin shop anywhere in range.  The dealer had a bunch of ancients, consigned from --it gets to be true-- a monk at a monastery not too far away.  They ran heavily to cheap Roman, from less than impressive 3rd century antoniniani to LRBs.  This coincided with Isaac Asimov's brilliant juvenile histories of the Roman Republic and Empire, which were in the library at the local grade school.  (Both long of print, and stratospheric to find online.)  I was wishing there was more Julio-Claudian and even Antonine stuff, while already gravitating toward the middle ages.  But there was also Just Enough Byzantine and Sasanian to keep me engaged on that front.

From around the mid-'70's, I started to buy stuff from mail-order catalogs, primarily from New York.  Yes, even Alex Malloy, when he was still actively in business.  (Those would be some catalogs I could wish I'd hung on to.)  This greatly expanded my horizons, especially where European and Frankish Levantine were concerned.  ...In the early '80's, I was fortunate enough to meet Tom Cederlind, who even then was as great as everyone says.  

...So then, in the early 2000's, I get to see a piece of genealogical fieldwork my uncle has just done.  My dad's side of the family (in dramatic contrast to the other one) is relentlessly New England WASP.  My uncle uncovered two family lines I'd never found.  Which proceeded to demonstrate reliably documented lineal ancestry from, for the dumbly obvious one, Edward I.  --By way of gentry who settled in what's now the extreme southeast of Maine, as of the mid-17th century.

That kind of put the genealogical research into high gear.  And here's the punch line.  If, from posts here, the way I collect is less than intuitive, it's really starting from coins issued by lineal ancestors, along with context, as expansively as I can afford.  

...Granted, I identify with, and gravitate toward, the coolly 11th-13th century aristocracy (particularly --can't lie to you-- in France, with all of that territorial sovereignty the French comtes had that the Anglo-Norman earls frankly didn't) than the royalty.  It's like, Everybody knows about them.  At least, who wants to.  But with medieval French aristocracy, sometimes you can get this perfect historical and numismatic storm, where a coin is issued in the name of some specific comte, or even seigneur (yes, d---it, including heirs and namesakes, but generally within only one generation), of whom there's a surprising amount of extant primary documentation.  And then you get to find out something, anyway, about what these people got up to.

And it's always entertaining.  ...Unlike, for instance, Edward I.  Kind of an equal-opportunity racist, whether you're talking about Welsh, Scots or Jews.  To be honest, finding out about that took some processing.  Not sure that I'm done, or should be.

 

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On 5/22/2023 at 1:11 PM, Valentinian said:

Some of us are relatively new to collecting ancient coins, and others of us have been at it for many years. Maybe you think ancient coin prices have gone up a lot and wish you were collecting long ago, but you are actually--right now--in the golden age for collecting ancient coins. For some of why that's true, look at my description of what collecting was like for me in the "old days" before the internet. 
http://augustuscoins.com/ed/numis/olddays.html

If you've been collecting since before the internet, I'd love to hear your thoughts about collecting in the old days and how collecting has changed. 

 

Very interesting topic.  I started collecting Ancients as far back as around 1974 but was very limited in budget back then.  I've tried to join this forum but the security check doesn't seem to be working. There it goes: I seem to have gotten in.

I tended to go to one coin store in my neighborhood which was not very helpful.  They were selling Roman denarii for $3 ea I recall but I was uncertain whether to buy any so I didn't.  Later I came back to the store and the silver was all bought but they had some bronzes of the Constantine period and perhaps of the Tetrarchy, running about $1.50 each.  I went wild and spent around $7.50 total, these were my 1st ancients.

 In the late 70's, when I was in college, I began to correspond with an advanced collector/ dealer: Frank S.? Robinson of New York.  He wrote to me about Roman sestersii and other issues. After college I wasn't so interested in Anceints but began to collect US type coins: like Bust Halves and Liberty Seated Halves.  But I was priced out of the rapidly rising US market at the time.

Went to grad school and after that I began to collect US type, Ancients and some World.  I lost interest in Ancients and sold a portion of my collection.  Around 1998 I got married and sold most of my US collection to help buy a house.  The US market was pretty strong and I thought World or foreign was a much better value.  I'd show coins to whoever came to visit us and people wanted me to do talks on Ancient Coins.  

To help my collection for displays and talks, I began to collect Ancients and World more seriously.  Today I present to ten 6th-grade classes every year at a local high school.  When they get to the Greek and Roman part of their history courses, I do a talk & coin presentation on "Ancient Civilizations as Shown by Coins".  I'll try to post some pix.

 

image.jpeg.206793f68606074b64b900d6f28eb6e3.jpegimage.jpeg.763753d25bc5e6c6c07f448422a702b5.jpeg

 

A Roman Coin I use as an avatar

image.jpeg.b0aee7de2961357a20f5d5a180194ab6.jpeg

 

 

 

 

Edited by Gallienus
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On 5/24/2023 at 8:24 PM, JeandAcre said:

 

From around the mid-'70's, I started to buy stuff from mail-order catalogs, primarily from New York.  Yes, even Alex Malloy, when he was still actively in business.  (Those would be some catalogs I could wish I'd hung on to.) 

This prompted me to look in the library I inherited from my dad - I found these Alex Malloy catalogs:

Medieval Coins I - XIII (13 volumes spanning 1970-1975)

Alex Malloy XXXI May-June 1973

Catalogue XXXVIII September 1975

Medieval Coins Auction Sale IV March 14, 1975

Medieval Coins Auction Sale VII March 13, 1976

Should be fun reading. If you want me to look anything up, let me know.

Edited by Bonshaw
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