FUN Show 2022

[Dafydd]

Hi All,

I am attending the FUN Show in Orlando over the next couple of days and would welcome advice about good dealers that sell and trade Ancients.

I also have a bit of a side thing going on that as an obsessive interest I collect Morgan Dollars, I don't know why really accept they are like collecting stamps or modern issues and I wondered if any dealer dealt in both?

Pleased to meet any members as well.

This show is easily 100 times larger than anything in the UK and I am here more by coincidence than design or would have posted earlier.

 

Thanks 

 

Dafydd

[Dafydd]

I had a great day at the FUN show.

I had some interesting conversations and saw more than I had expected in respect of Ancients. As for Morgan Dollars.... I have never seen so many in my life and they must have numbered into seven figures! Did they really melt that many....

I stopped by Tiber Numismatics who had a great display and actually priced items. It is a pet hate of mine that people don't price things so if they can't be bothered it takes a lot for me to bother myself. Whilst at this booth I had a brief chat with Barry Murphy which was pleasant and unexpected. It is always nice to put a face to a name.

I met David Rifkin of Tiber and on his table was a pile of low grade cleaned miscellaneous ancients and I saw him give some away to children telling them that if they were under 14 they could pick one for free. He did better than that as he explained the coin to the child and wrote a description of what it was on a packet for them. I saw him do this three times. What a great gesture and a sure fire way to possibly make a spark of interest that could lead to a fire in a young collector. He is to be congratulated. 

I managed to pick up the final coin in my "Year of the five Emperors" namely a Didius Julianus denarius. See below. I made a great deal on the ticket price because David said he recently bought it and now thought that it had been artificially toned. It was way below my budget for a Didius, and whilst not a great coin it filled a hole. My concern was not fake patina but that was alleviated by the fact that he clearly knows what he is doing and offers a lifetime guarantee.

When I got the coin back to my lodgings I found it within 5 minutes on Coin Archives and clearly it had been tampered with. So this coin was sold in an auction in London around six weeks ago and made it to a convention 5000 miles away in six weeks or less. I worked out that the price I made was the same price as it was sold.

I am going to run an OP on this as I am looking for some advice on what to do? My thought was probably to do nothing.

This is the coin that was sold at Roma Auction 97 in the last week of May. Lot 1208.  It looks to me if someone has tried to disguise the stain. It is now a total slate gray with an almost indiscernible blue hue.