I agree with Joe and with the cited post by
Robert K. Symptomatic of the decrease in (new) supply is that my own collection shows increasing proportions of old-collection coins. My upgrades are FROM 1990s moderate condition Balkan finds TO better coins probably found in the 19th century and seen in 1900s
auctions. Of course the latter are increasingly
scarce, as each year a proportion of old
provenance coins go missing, through loss, being melted down, or placed in museums. What's left is hardly enough to sustain a
coin show such as NYINC. The mirror image of Joe's issue in sales is my issue in finding coins at retail. For that reason, when a
complete collection is offered for sale, such as JD, RBW, Student-Mentor, I go wild, and send my noisier children to the pawn
shop to raise
money for coins. The children will
still be there when I go to retrieve them, but the
old collection coins won't.
Today I found another old
provenance for a coin,
Henry Platt Hall,
Spink 1950, lot 455. I'd acquired the
catalogue because I also owned lot 461 from the same sale. I'd actually been considering
selling lot 455. I won't now. In addition to Platt Hall, it was also owned by RBW and by a well-known
Italian collector,
Fallani, whose collection is cited often by
Crawford. Not in the best condition but this
provenance sure adds some lustre:
[BROKEN IMAGE LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN]
I suspect that when I go to sell my own collection in time, there will either be a great deal of interest given that it is primarily composed of old
provenance coins, or no interest at all as the difficulties assembling
collections from what's now available on the market means many will have given up the struggle. However I'm optimistic, recognising that there's nothing that motivates a collector more than difficulty. So there should
still be some interest.