Here's November purchase that came with a wonderful surprise (as have many of the sale catalogs I've bought from
Forum... I wonder if this was another group from Alex
Malloy's old catalogs, as I've noticed for some others?)...
Note:
The coin is NOT ex-Forum, only the CATALOG.
The catalogs' photography (scans, I think) is low production-value but there are over 4,000 (!) ancients cataloged, with between 1k-2k illustrated! Some important provenances noted. And cataloged by Matt
Kreuzer, who is well-known and -- as far as I can tell -- respected as a competent, professional
numismatist. (These aren't in Gengerke's U.S.
auction biblio, but they're noted in
Fitzwilliam's
catalog [
LINK].)
CLASSICAL CASH (Matt Kreuzer, Boston, MA).
Kreuzer's first two Mail Bid Sales (5 May 1995 & 28 April 1996).
MBS 1 (13.5.95): 1,165 Lots Ancient (pp. 2-102), majority ill., plus >200 modern (103-117); large-format, soft cover, B&W.
Images apparently from a scanner, low resolution. Much worse than typical DIY dealer catalogs from 1950s-1990s, despite
plenty of coins that would sell for four figures today.
MBS 2 (28.4.96): >3,150 Lots Ancient (pp. 1-111), many illustrated, plus 700 modern (111-120), hundreds of
antiquities, esp.
lamps &
rings (121-137); large-format, soft cover, B&W.
Image
quality perhaps a
bit better than MBS 1, but
still low for the time; smaller print (large-print editions were available) with smaller proportion illustrated (but more total ill.); some repetition of material.
I use sale catalogs for
provenance research, but I didn't have very high hopes for these ones. But the
price was very attractive & they'd come in handy some day. (It's a numbers game: Look through enough old catalogs, keep as many on your shelves as you can, keep checking them, and you'll find lost provenances.)
So, I was thrilled to make an immediate and completely unexpected discovery ...
My favorite
part: "
Apparently unpublished and probably important"!
As it happens, I had just purchased that coin from CNG (27 years later).
The only known example of an XL bronze (35mm, 21.2g) of
Antoninus Pius from
Hadrianopolis in
Thrace (this coin =
RPC IV 11165 Temp [
LINK] =
Varbanov II, 3145). (Not
Amphipolis as
Kreuzer suspected.)
COIN PHOTOS: You can see the coin's image from
CNG [
LINK] or here on
RPC [
LINK], or
Varbanov vol. 2 if you have a copy. (Elsewhere I made illustrations showing how he modified
CNG's 2002 photo [
LINK].)
Both
CNG and
RPC had described it as the second known example, the first having been published in
Varbanov II, 3145. Comparing the
auction photos to
Varbanov's, it became clear that
Varbanov had modified the photo from
CNG 61 (25 September 2002), lot 1021 (the photo now in
RPC). (Darkening some pixels around legends, also giving it better centering, etc.) In any case, just one coin.
The Kreuzer/Classical Cash
catalog doesn't given anything earth-shattering about where the coin came from, but being a
bit of a mysterious coin, I was very happy to have found another link in its chain-of-custody, and to have pushed back the date of the coin's import to the USA by another 7 years or so to 1995.
ALSO: An interesting thing about dealer lists and catalogs from the 1990s (any time, really) is you can find interesting reflections of changing historical/technological circumstances. The internet was becoming important to ancient coin dealing, publishing & photography were changing, home-printing and scanning were becoming available....
It's no knock on this purchase (which I'm thrilled with) or
Kreuzer personally, just a "historical observation": Looks to me like he might've used a scanner for the images. It really didn't come out well! He published two more Classical Cash catalogs (I don't yet have copies), then 5-14 were online only, and according to
Fitzwilliam, "nos 15-20 published as a single pamphlet." I'm not sure how many more lists he published under
his name, but he continued doing business as oldromancoins.com for quite a while.