One thousand not out

[akeady]

I see that the number of Roman Republican + Imperatorial coins I have on Tantalus has reached 1000!

This number isn't exactly the number of coins I have, as some are not on Tantalus and I've given away 1, but it's near enough and I figured I'd reach 1000 by the end of the year.

On Tantalus, this is coin 999 (coin 1000 was posted already in a "Latest coin" thread):

Gens:	Anonymous - L-T
Coin:	Bronze Sextans L - Head of Minerva right, wearing Corinthian helmet; below, two pellets T - The Dioscuri galloping right
Exergue:	ROMA
Mint:	Near Herdonia (213 BC)
Wt./Size/Axis:	10.09g / 24mm / 10h
References:	Sydenham 134 Crawford 98A/6 RBW 435
Provenances:	Ex. Andrew McCabe Collection Ex. Gibboni Collection, Munzen & Medaillen, Auction 19, 16-May-2006, lot 598 Ex. Heracles Fixed Price List, Dec. 2003
Acquisition:	Roma Numismatics Online auction Auction XXIX #320 9-Nov-2023

I'm not sure how many more RR coins I can add - I guesstimated it would take 20 years to get reasonably close to completing the collection and that was 5 years ago.   So, another 15 years and likely adding fewer coins per year, but scarcer/more expensive ones?

Maybe upgrade a lot of examples of common coins which are available in better condition than the examples I have?   Start side collections in different symbols on coins?   Will I ever be able to add Eid Mar denarius and other rare/expensive types?

Anyway, here's to the next 1000.

ATB,
Aidan.

Edited December 6, 2023 by akeady
Fixed a typo'

[Xeno]

Congratulations! Admirable goals, once your collection gets to that point efficient storage becomes much more important.

[Ryro]

Incredible milestone! I always enjoy your additions. 

By "completing the collection" what are your parameters? At you shooting to get all Roman Republic coins?? 

To add to the fun here's my most recent bronze RR:

Anonymous. AE Litra

c. 269 BC. Obv. Helmeted head of Minerva right. Rev. Head of horse right. Cr. 17/1d. AE. 4.40 g. 15.50 mm. Olive green patina. About VF. 

[panzerman]

Congratulations! Reaching the 1000 plateau will be quite the achievement🤗!

John

[akeady]

16 minutes ago, Ryro said:

Incredible milestone! I always enjoy your additions. 

By "completing the collection" what are your parameters? At you shooting to get all Roman Republic coins?? 

To add to the fun here's my most recent bronze RR:

Anonymous. AE Litra

c. 269 BC. Obv. Helmeted head of Minerva right. Rev. Head of horse right. Cr. 17/1d. AE. 4.40 g. 15.50 mm. Olive green patina. About VF. 

When I started I wanted to have a "Representative collection of RR coins".   That would need some of all denominations and periods, but not every rare coin - the really rare coins probably weren't encountered too often even by the Romans, so no need to collect them 😄.   I'm not there yet - probably need one or two of the later aurei and a few more earlier aes grave coins and currency bars, but it is achievable in a couple of years.

I'd like to get every type - say, taking Crawford as a reference - but that will be impossible as there are maybe forty unique types and many more which are extremely rare and/or expensive, so I will never complete that.

I'm interested in knowing when others have decided that their collection is complete and what they did then!   I have most of the common/inexpensive types so at some point it will get to the stage where I can only add a few coins a year - maybe the fun in the chase will be all the more then or maybe I'll get frustrated, I don't know 😄

Congrats on your litra!   It reminds me that I have at least two of those not on Tantalus.

ATB,
Aidan.

[akeady]

53 minutes ago, Xeno said:

Congratulations! Admirable goals, once your collection gets to that point efficient storage becomes much more important.

Storage is an interesting issue.   Most of my RR coins are in Abafil trays, some of them in this Marmotta cabinet:

This takes 20 trays - when I took this photo', I had mixed bronze and silver coins in the same cabinet - denarius-sized and smaller coins fit into the trays with 77 spaces, so this can hold 1540 coins if filled with 20 of those trays.   For larger bronze coins, I was using 40 space trays.   There are seven or eight trays with bronze coins in the picture.   I had one tray of Augustan denarii there too - Augustus overlaps the Republican and Imperial eras, so I put him with the Republicans.

I've since got another Marmotta made by Abafil for the double depth trays for Aes Grave - this takes 10 trays.   So far, I have only two of the extra-deep trays, so I moved 8 trays of normal thickness bronze coins into that as well.

It is better to store the bronze and silver coins together as they were issued together each year - the same moneyers issued bronzes as well as silver coins.   However, the largest bronze coins are much larger than the silver coins, so storage-wise I'd have to use more trays.   Hence the separation into trays of denarii and trays of bronzes.

The really large Aes Grave coins are in trays with only six spaces.

I'll take more photos, but it will be a couple of weeks before I get to it.

One annoying thing about trays is that you need to leave some empty spaces to allow for additional coins.   Otherwise, after each addition a big reorganisation is needed.   One solution might be to start off with enough space for all available coins and just populate the ones you have.   Of course, this doesnt' allow for duplicates - but perhaps only one coin of each type should be in the trays and duplicates (or near duplicates, such as varieties with different symbols) could be kept in envelopes?   For now, I've got everything in trays, but for some types I have several examples (e.g., 13 of Cr. 340/1) and am tempted to relegate some of them to envelopes!

The rest of my collection - Roman Imperial, Greek, Modern - is in a mixture of loose trays and cabinets - by Alberto Zecchi, Peter Nichols and Swan - and folders and some in envelopes.   Shamefully, there are 2 ancients in slabs 😄.

As far as security - I keep my most expensive coins in Sentinel Vaults - which is safe but a hassle to get them out.

ATB,
Aidan.

Edited December 6, 2023 by akeady

[Xeno]

@akeady I use trays as well, lighthouse brand instead of abafil, my trays have 24 spaces each a little under 2"x2" and I can put in a custom card with all the informantion organized the way I like and put a layer of protective mylar on top of the card. I agree about the organization, if you are close to maxed out on space then reorganizations will be needed. I am reorganizing my coins less as I find ways to organize them more efficiently from the get go, and one of the ways to do that is to have extra trays on hand so you can just keep adding coins rather than reorganizing. I separate mine into Greek bronze, Greek silver, Roman provincial, roman imperial (I only have one republican coin I throw it in with the imperial for now), and then miscellaneous. But I will need to make space soon and have a more dedicated place to store them, the cases with the trays can sometimes end up wherever is convenient. I would like to have a dedicated desk with all my coins, books, magnifying glasses etc.

[Deinomenid]

10 hours ago, akeady said:

Sentinel Vaults 

Very jealous of this.

My bank still has one of those giant state-of-the-art-in-1912 ship's wheel things they have to slowly turn  to open the doors to the room with the deposit boxes. 

[NewStyleKing]

Oh Dear, once or twice such depository's have been penetrated recently in the UK. One by taking members families hostages , the other is the (in)famous Hatton garden job where they drilled through the wall! Both are far better than my security at home! What would they make of As Rude etc?😀

[kirispupis]

Congrats on reaching such a milestone! I just looked at my database and I'm at 661 total coins (with 11 on the way). I think my wife will kill me if I break 1000 next year, so it should be a few more years for me. 🙂

[Roerbakmix]

Nice! Counting the two sceattas that are on their way, my sceatta collection is now 99 coins. Realistically, 100 should be possible before the 31th

[akeady]

5 hours ago, kirispupis said:

Congrats on reaching such a milestone! I just looked at my database and I'm at 661 total coins (with 11 on the way). I think my wife will kill me if I break 1000 next year, so it should be a few more years for me. 🙂

Good luck!  Overall, I've got 2340 coins on Tantalus.  The RR part has grown to be the largest, but I'm still attracted to other coins too 😄

ATB,

Aidan.

 

[SteveJBrinkman]

On 12/5/2023 at 7:45 PM, akeady said:

So, another 15 years and likely adding fewer coins per year, but scarcer/more expensive ones?

Aiden, This is my dilemma too.  I don't have nearly the number of coins that you do in your collection, but even still, I'm finding that those missing from my specialty area become available very infrequently, so I can no longer afford buying 10-20 coins a year in the quality standards that I try to maintain.

 

On 12/5/2023 at 9:09 PM, akeady said:

One annoying thing about trays is that you need to leave some empty spaces to allow for additional coins.   Otherwise, after each addition a big reorganisation is needed. 

Full trays.  This is a good problem to have. 

[DonnaML]

I continue to be amazed by the number of different Roman Republican coin types you have. I know you said that there are about 40 types that are unique and unattainable and many more that are extremely rare/expensive, but what is the exact total number of different types listed in Crawford? And are there any entirely new types that have been discovered since Crawford was published almost 50 years ago now?

Of course, if you ever did "complete" a collection of obtainable types, you could then begin collecting all the different die varieties with different control symbols and control symbol combinations. Given that there are 864 different known obverse dies and 1,080 different reverse dies just for the single issue of L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi (the father) in 90 BCE (even though no complete die study has ever been carried out; see Crawford Vol. I  p. 340) -- issued in connection with the Social War -- and at least half that number for the similar issue by his son C. Calpurnius Piso L.f. Frugi about 30 years later, with nearly 500 known different die combinations and configurations of control symbols (see the appendix to Hersh's 1976 study), that would probably take you several lifetimes to collect for those two types alone! 

My Roman Republican & Imperatorial collection, although I'm very happy with it, is dwarfed by yours. Right now it consists of only 92 different types (with one that hasn't arrived yet and two more I haven't yet written up!), all of which still fit in a single 99-compartment Lindner tray that I display upright in a bookstand. I have about 450 ancient coins in total in 8 Lindner/Lighthouse trays, and about 25 additional trays of various sizes for the non-ancient coins & medals (predominantly British along with French and other European) that I've collected over the last 50+ years.

I've had a safe deposit box in a bank for many years, but most banks in New York City (and I believe elsewhere in the USA) are trying to eliminate the space devoted to something that brings in such a comparatively small amount of revenue. I don't think there any banks in this city that will rent you a new safe deposit box at this point -- they simply retire boxes that are closed out or abandoned -- and I'm sure the time will come when they phase them out entirely. At which point all that will be left are private companies, like the "Sentinel" in Ireland that you use. What would worry me is the question of what happens if a company like that goes out of business or turns out to be dishonest? Is there insurance or other recourse?

 

Edited December 8, 2023 by DonnaML

[akeady]

Hi Donna,

I have quantity rather than quality!   There are others with more, though.   I made a spreadsheet of all the types in Crawford some time ago - I cannot remember offhand how many entries there were - it was slightly more than 2500 I think.   CRRO was organised that way, but now has lumped some varieties together under one number at the main search page, so now it shows 1747 entries - varieties are only listed when you select a type.   Some of the varieties seem minor to me - in some cases legend varieties are lumped together, in other cases they merit a separate entry - but others are more significant.   Right now I'm in Shanghai and don't have access to the spreadsheet (I have a copy on Google Docs, but that isn't accessible in China - I had a VPN, but that stopped working on Day 2 here, so a bit cut off!), but will update in a couple of weeks.   CRRO doesn't render properly for me here, I suppose it's pulling in some files which are inaccessible, so it looks like this for me - most of the text is Black On Black, so has to be selected to be read:

Anyway, there are some types not in Crawford - e.g., the H denarius.   Additionally, more recent work by Andrew McCabe and others splits up some of Crawford's bronze categories - e.g., the 56 series, into different issues.   Cr 56/x is a catch-all for anonymous bronzes and several different issues are represented.

There was a strange quinarius sold by Artemide a couple of years ago which quickly reappeared (on Roma?) which is a new and strange type, if real!

Yes - plenty of symbols to keep anyone busy for lifetimes.   There was a large collection of RR coins sold fairly recently (2 - 3 years ago) by a Spanish auction house with many different examples of symbols on the coins - there were at least of dozens of different symbols per type represented.   I threw in a few bids but didn't win anything.

I don't think any Irish banks will take on new customers for deposit boxes either, so we are also stuck with expensive private operators.   Some of us from the Numismatic Society of Ireland went on a tour of the Bank Of Ireland's College Green branch last year - a fine building which once housed the Irish Parliament, before the Act Of Union.
When the parliament building became surplus with the abolition of the parliament, it was sold to the bank and has been a commercial bank since.   Anyway, part of the tour went to the vault, where they have shelves and shelves of stuff left there for, in some cases, a couple of centuries.   There are not as many treasures as alluded to in the article below, but I wouldn't mind a rummage (our guide was disparaging of the guy mentioned in the article):

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/right-here-in-the-banks-there-s-literally-hoards-of-stuff-unclaimed-1.3815521 

I will not be happy if Sentinel goes out of business or I go in sometime and find I've been raided!

ATB,
Aidan.

Edited December 8, 2023 by akeady

[akeady]

On 12/8/2023 at 7:59 PM, DonnaML said:

I continue to be amazed by the number of different Roman Republican coin types you have. I know you said that there are about 40 types that are unique and unattainable and many more that are extremely rare/expensive, but what is the exact total number of different types listed in Crawford?

 

I make it 2270 types in Crawford - I may have made a mistake or two along the way, but when I made a spreadsheet of all the types, that's what I ended up with - still in China, but have been able to get access to some things through VPN!

ATB,
Aidan.