Coins that are difficult to catalog

Some coins are difficult to catalog, because scholarship is not in agreement about the origin. The attribution of this coin is apparently insecure.

An anonymous cataloger (Künker auction 97, March 2005, lot 897) attributes to Euagoras II, 361-351 BC, Salamis Mint. Cites Babelon (Les Perses Achemenides (1893), #191) and Koray Konuk (SNG Kayhan 1066). The cataloger hedges saying an alternate is an uncertain Cilician mint.

Another cataloger (CNG, MBS 67, September 2004, lot 825) attributes to Datames, Satrap of Cilicia and Cappadocia. 384-362 BC, citing George Hill (BMC Cilicia (1900), pg. 100, 25) (as Mallos) and Babelon, (Les Perses Achemenides (1893), #191).

A similar coin is fancifully attributed to “Memnon, Satrap in Ionien (?)” in Nachfolger auction 376 (October 2003, lot 357). This attribution was not satisfying; a similar coin (auction 386, April 2006, lot 256) was catalogued as the satrap Mazaios, 361-334 BC, struck at an uncertain mint but possible Tarsos; citing Axel Winzer (Antike Portraitmünzen der Perser und Griechen (2005)).

A Baldwin’s cataloger attributes one of these (auction 34, October 2003, lot 84) to “Caria/Ionia, uncertain mint, satrapal coinage, time of Artaxerxes III, c. 358-340 BC” citing “Traité p.167, 30; Head, Coinage of Lydia and Persia, pl.III, 27, Pharnabazus”

The Roman Coinage of Cyprus

John Aveline reviews Park's The Roman Coinage of Cyprus for Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

(Via rogueclassicism).

Athens - Sparta - New York

The three irregular lines are supposedly the traditional spit coinage of Sparta. The originals are in New York City for the next three weeks, as part of an exhibition, Athens-Sparta, at the Onassis Cultural Center, 645 Fifth Avenue.

Admission is free. There is a lot of amazing pottery and scuplture, nearly all from Athens or Sparta.

I was also excited about some metal toy soldiers and mythological monsters. The exhibit card said the figures had some votive purpose. Maybe they are found in temples, but I still think they are toy soldiers. A lot of Christian churches keep a room full of toys, and not for any religious purpose other than to get parents to come to Bible study class.

Anyway, the coins. A very nice group of Athenian coins, including one of the ANS's dekadrachms. Most (all?) denominations of the Athena-owl coinage are on display, including the tiny fractions.

There is also a group of coinage spits of Sparta. I have no idea how archeologists tell these spits from cooking spits, it wasn't explained in the exhibit. (There is a very nice $30 catalog of the show but I didn't get it.)

A Syracusan dekadrachm is also present. I don't know why. It is on display in the middle of the Athenian coins. It kind of looks out-of-place. I never thought I'd turn down seeing a dekadrachm but the Athenian coinage would have been more impressive without the Sicilian invader.

The Bill Wyman Signature Detector

Bill Wyman quit his band, the Rolling Stones, 15 years ago. He now writes about antiquties (Bill Wyman's Treasure Island) and recently designed a new metal detector.

This is a great development. We need more numismatic authors and antiquities experts. If you are in a band, maybe The Who or Pink Floyd, now is your chance to do something important like writing literature.

While researching this story (looking at the Wikipedia entry for Bill Wyman), I learned that he was his own grandfather. You blow my mind, Bill Wyman.

BMC Crete and the Aegean Islands

Google now brings Warwick Wroth's 1886 catalog BMC Crete and the Aegean Islands!

CNG 75

The CNG 75 auction is online. 570 book lots, 575 ancient Greek lots, etc., etc., etc.

(Update) The most interesting coin is lot 392, a fourée electrum 1/24 stater. The anonymous cataloger tells us that this coin proves the same mint made good and fourée coins. It would be interesting to re-examine the good specimens in light of the new piece!

More auctions

The Numismatica Ars Classica auction 39, auction 40, and auction R catalogs are online. The highlight is lot #8, an Akragas tetradrachm, although there is an Athenian dekadrachm with a higher estimate. Closing May 15, 2007.

The Hess-Divo auction 307 catalog is online. Closing June 6, 2007.

Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger catalogs online

The Gerhard Hirsch Nachfolger auction catalogs 250 and 251 are online. They also arrived in the mail today. The auction 250 catalog is hardcover and celebrates the 125 anniversary of Hirsch (1878-2007). The coins are very high quality.

55 lots of ancients in auction 250 and about 600 in auction 251.


I was just thinking about Hirsch's illustrious history this afternoon. I know they sold Imhoof-Blumer's collection in 1907. 2515 lots. I have a lot of photocopies of Imhoof-Blumer's works, and they often describe a rare or unique coin, unpictured, and say "M.S." which is German for "My Collection". It would be a nice catalog to have, or to have a CD-ROM of. I've never actually seen a copy, although the ANS has one.

19th century Numismatic Chronicles

Google recently added a bunch more full-view and downloadable issues of the Numismatic Chronicle. Most of the 1850s issues are now available. I've updated my web page on available issues. The new issues were scanned at the UofM and the Bodleian. Thanks.

Google is still blocking most non-US countries from this material. At the bottom of my NC page is a link to access my page through a US proxy. Use that. My favorite proxy is now running advertising banners, but it isn't bad.

The Baldwin's catalogs for the April 24-25th auctions are online

The auctions are #50, #51, and 'Islamic #12'. The Islamic auction is at Sixbid.com as interactive HTML and on Baldwin's usual website in PDF format. Baldwin's is in London but their website address is baldwin.sh, suggesting they are located on the South Atlantic Isle of St. Helena! Do not be fooled. If you are in London it is worth stopping in; I was able to get a copy of SNG Levante Supplement inexpensively three years ago there.

Auction 50 is Ancient, British, and Indian coins. Only 205 ancients, but one is an Athenian dekadrachm!

Auction 51 is foreign, medals, and books. There are only about 150 lots of books but many are group lots with several titles, and the selection of books on Indian numismatics is good.

I got the auction 50 catalog in the mail with an offprint of 51 containing just the books. I've never seen an auction offprint before. It is a good idea; books descriptions don't need to be printed on super-glossy paper. It also saves space, because I don't need the medal catalog.

Medialia

I visited the Industrialization exhibit at Medialia on Saturday. I'd like to recommend the show, but Saturday was the last day.

The show presented art and historical medals on the theme of industrialization. I enjoyed the show, which occupied two glass cases in the small gallery, as well as the permanent medal collection. My favorite pieces were some Japanese medals what seemed like a traditional style, and a Soviet space medal showing the Baikonur Cosmodrome behind Kazakh peasants.

Medialia is a gallery selling fine art sculpture. All the pieces are small, and most are what I'd call art medals. Until last week, I was unaware that New York even had a medal gallery. I've been to most of the shops that advertise in the ‘Coin and Stamp Dealer’ category in the phone book or whom show at the few local coin shows. Medialia doesn't do either. It appears in the phone book under ‘Antique Dealers’ and ‘Art Galleries & Dealers’.

I didn't know how to behave in the shop. When I'm in a coin dealer, I know that nearly everything is for sale, and that anything I'm not allowed to touch will be in a protective slab or 2x2. At an art gallery, one never touches anything.

I was given a free catalog of the show. It wasn't on glossy paper but it was still nice — and something one doesn't get at coin shops. The catalog seemed like something that medal and numismatic literature collectors would want, but I've never seen a Medialia catalog in a coin book auction and the ANS library appears to lack them as well. So, the catalogs are a new offering or great rarities.

At Medialia, only a few of the items had prices. The prices seemed high to me, but the medals offered were mostly better than the $50 medals I've bought at coin shows and on eBay. I plan to go back again, and learn about art medals. The space seems to host a lot of short shows. I picked up an announcement about an opening this Saturday, but the details are not yet on the web site.

Bootleg Bulletin on Counterfeits

I received the bootleg Bulletin on Counterfeits yesterday.

Although ‘Microbe’ promised a pressed CD all I received was an unlabelled CD-R.

The CD-R contains the 1976-1999 run, as JPEG files, two pages per file. The pages were scanned at 150dpi. The pages are quite readable, although on some years there is bleed-through from the other side of the page. (Recommendation: put black construction paper between pages while scanning to counteract this scanning flaw.)

The disc also contains a 21 page MS-Word format index. The index is broken down by category (Greek Silver through Modern). The contents of each category are sorted alphabetically by city or country. It's useful, but an improvement would be an HTML document that hyperlinks to the individual page files.

I don't know if the bootlegger wrote the index or if he merely acquired it elsewhere. This index is different from the partial index at the Lakdiva site. I hope the author puts it online.

German translation

A lot of numismatic books are written only in German. I don't read German, but I need to read German coin descriptions. Here's what I do.

The first step is to type in the German text. It's important to get accents right. Use Windows Character Map (Linux has something similar) or the 'Insert Symbol' feature in Microsoft Word. Then I feed the text to Google Language Tools for a very rough translation.

Google is lacking a lot of words. There are four dictionaries I use. For coins, Münzen Lexikon is useful. There are also two big general German-to-English dictionaries online, LEO and The New English-German Dictionary.

There is also a Wiki translating dictionary, Wiktionary. If none of the above dictionaries have the word I can go there and enter requests for English definitions of German words by volunteer translators.

The text that comes out of Google is often poor, especially because without a numismatic dictionary Google doesn't even know the parts of speech. However, I can hand-edit the text into something readable, especially if I have a picture of the coin being described to refer to.

Other multilingual numismatic glossaries are Wörterbuch der gebräuchlichsten Fachausdrücke für Münzsammler and Moruzzi Numismatica glossary, but I rarely have luck there.

For abbreviations, like "pkr" (= perlkreis) I have to ask for the full word on an ancient coin website.

LHS and Tkalec catelogs online

The LHS auction 100 and Tkalec 2007 auction catalogs are online. The LHS auction is April 23/24th and the Tkalec is April 22nd.

Information wants to be $35

On Friday a Yahoo account named 'Mike Robe' (=microbe) offered CD-ROMs containing the entire run of “Bulletin on Counterfeits” and an index, for $35. The offer sounded bogus, but initial reports said it was legit.

The web site hosting the offer is now gone, and the seller claims his run of 25 copies sold out.

Reid Goldsborough reports that the IAPN is now considering selling a legitimate CD-ROM. No word on availability or price.

Reid concludes his message with a screed against freeloaders, saying “If I and others aren't paid for some of our work, if everything is free for the taking, guess what's going to happen to the quality of information available.”

I wish it was that simple.

I'm told that most books on ancient coins do not recoup their printing costs. Authors who have the support of a press willing to take a loss can get paid. Everyone else has to self-publish. Under these conditions it makes sense to write for free. Why would anyone want to earn NEGATIVE $7000 publishing a book? Better to put it online and only lose $10/month.

There isn't much money in numismatic writing. I've heard that RPC volumes 8 and 9 are done but there is no money to pay for publishing. The publishers of Agoranomia tell me they don't like putting 'coins' or 'coinage' in titles because it discourages libraries from buying! We are in a period in history when there is very little interest in old coins. I don't think the lack of interest is because of file-sharing. No one has offered me digital copies of RPC!

Publishers are free to charge whatever they want. A pirate who named himself after H5N1 Avian Flu sold 25 copies of BoC and made about $30x25=$750 profit last week. The IAPN made a business decision to price BoC at over $500 and probably made $0 last week. I'd rather the IAPN get the money, but that's now how economics works.

The musician Frank Zappa was very clever. Pirates released albums of his concerts. Frank took their packaging and sold it himself. The IAPN could turn around tomorrow and sell microbe's package.

I bought the IAPN's book on The Caprara Forgeries and was paying $60/year for “Counterfeit Coin Bulletin”. I thought Caprara was worth the money.

The recent incarnation of the Bulletin was not worth $60/year to a collector. It was mostly pictures of US fakes with arrows pointing to die flaws. No interesting text. To a dealer, $60 may be a bargain. Collectors don't see it that way. One suggestion is to charge a lot of money for current issues, and make additional money selling last year's issues to collectors at a lower price.

New software for 'scanning' with digital camera

Teleread's Branko Collin briefly discusses Snapter, new software to improve digital photographs of books making pages look scanned.

A free trial of Snapter is available from the Atiz website.

New book on forgeries

SP-P has announced a new book by I. Prokopov, Coin Forgeries and Replicas 2006. I haven't seen this book yet. The earlier books in the series are good.

The book publishes 201 fakes, including a 20 page catalog of fake Histiaea tetrobols.

New discounts from David Brown Book Company

The David Brown Book Company is discounting these titles:

Caesarea Maritima: The Coins and the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Economy of Palestine by Jane DeRose Evans
$68.00 (list $84.95)

Agoranomia: Studies in Money and Exchange Presented to John H. Kroll edited by Peter G. van Alfen
$100.00 (list $125.00)

Roman Provincial Coinage VII: Gordian I to Gordian III (238-244). Première partie. Province d'Asie by Marguerite Spoerri Butcher
$192.00 (list $240.00)

Roman Provincial Coinage, Volume I by Andrew Burnett, Michael Amandry and Pere Pau Ripollès
$260.00 (list $325.00)

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Deutschland 14: Attika - Megaris - Aegina
$76.00 (list $96.00)

Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum Deutschland: Syrien: Nicht-koenigliche Praegungen
$132.00 (list $165.00)

Islamic History Through Coins: An Analysis and Catalogue of Tenth-Century Ikhshidid Coinage by Jere L Bacharach
$22.00 (list $24.50)

Money of the Caribbean edited by Richard G Doty and John M Kleeberg
$52.00 (list $65.00)

Coins of the Holy Land: The Abraham D. Sofaer Collection at The American Numismatic Society by Ya'akov Meshorer et al.
$120 (list $150)

Sylloge of Coins in the British Isles 55: Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg Part IV. English, Irish and Scottish Coins, 1066-1485 by Marina Mucha
29.98 (list $85.00)

Ancient Greek Coins: Catalogue of the Classical Collection, Museum of Art (RI) by Ross Holloway
14.98 (list $50.00)

Ancient Jewish Coinage: Vol. 1. by Ya'Akov Meshorer
9.98 (list $45.00)

Catalogue of the Aksumite Coins in the British Museum by Stuart Munro-Hay
49.98 (list $117.00)

Coin Hoards IX. Greek Hoards Meadows, Andrew
79.98 (list $130.00)

Zecca: Mint of Venice in Middle Ages by Alan M. Stahl
19.98 (list $79.00)

Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces edited by Christopher Howgego, Volker Heuchert and Andrew Burnett
59.98 (list $150.00)

The Coinage of the Atrebates and Regni by Simon Bean
19.98 (list $50.00)

Coins (Interpreting the Past) Burnett, Andrew M.
4.98 (list $12.95)

Humphrey Cole: Mint, Measurement and Maps edited by Silke Ackermann
9.98 (list $27.00)

Metal Analyses of Roman Coins Minted under the Roman Empire by L H Cope, C. E. King, J. P. Northover and T. Clay
9.98 (list $22.50)

Studies in Greek Numismatics in Memory of Martin Jessop Price edited by R Ashton and S Hurter
39.98 (list $150.00)

Sylloge: (SNG ANS 6) Palestine-South Arabia Meshorer, Ya'Akov
14.98 (list $125.00)

Should fake antique dealers be punished?

Writing for China Daily, Li Qian asks Should fake antique dealers be punished?

“A fake ancient coin dealer was sentenced to three years in jail and fined at a Nanjing court days earlier, causing an uproar in the collections [sic] society...”

“Experts estimate as many as half of antiques dealers would face jail terms in China if the country punishes them using current laws for common businesses...”

“Fake antique articles have left many collectors suffering from hefty losses, as the technological trend of counterfeiting becomes a headache for even the most experienced experts ... Some [forgers] raise bugs and mice to bite on scrolls to make them appear ancient.”

Elsen auction 91 online

Jean Elsen's auction 91 catalog is online, with 474 ancient coins. There are also many 'siege coins'.