Milestone report:
I've completed my
catalogue review of
- all 101
CNG printed
auctions- all 107 NAC
auctions incl. letter sales
- 14
13 Vecchi auctions - I'm missing 4,5,
13,16 of the original 17
From these three sources I found 500
494 provenances (out of a
collection of 1190, so I'm slightly over 40% "provenanced" by now). Essentially all my really old provenances also passed through one of these three houses (principally NAC and
CNG) because that's where my high end coins have tended to come from.
Surveying the rest - 690
696 coins - probably one quarter have a very recent printed
auction provenance I can lock immediately by just looking it up and
writing it down. Most are coins I bought here and there from dealers such as
Gorny, Kuenker,
Hirsch, Vico, Aureo etc, that I just haven't got round to
writing up properly; generally
German and there is
fair hope that I can find the same coins in older
German sales. A further quarter were private purchases from
collections that likely originated in
Italy at some point though there's nothing I can cite, though I can cite my own photo-upload date as evidence of "out of
Italy date". But a few may be findable in old
Italian FPLs such as de Falco or Baranowsky. For another quarter I can cite my own retail purchase from a reputable dealer (without evidence) and trust you will believe me. And the final slice can never be provenanced because they represent recently found coins whose first ever market appearance was when they were sold to me by seller that cannot be cited as a
provenance e.g.
eBay or a vest-pocket dealer.
I'm using
Warren Esty's listings
http://esty.ancients.info/catalogs/ to guide my searches from about 1990 to date.
Spring works well until 1975 or so, especially in conjunction with my own detailed review
http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/RRAuctions.html of pre-1970 sales. There's an inventory gap between 1975 and 1990 - no readily accessible source that says what is in those catalogues. Likewise for FPLs of all dates. Ted Buttrey's
Fitzwilliam list is the most comprehensive
http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/dept/coins/library/salescatalogue/ but doesn't list contents. It is however invaluable for putting an actual date to a numbered sale e.g. that Leu 86 was on 5th May 2003. The html lists are tedious to scroll through, so use the "Find on this page" browser function.
Overall I'm reasonably confident of getting to 60% documented provenances (citation to a printed
catalogue or FPL) over the long run, and to able to cite provenances for 75% of my
collection - including those cases where I write "Purchased from Baldwin's, 1996" on my own recognizance. However the CNG/NAC/Vecchi stream represents the low hanging fruit, so I expect progress to become very slow from now (once I've tackled the remaining recent provenances). I haven't yet done a comprehensive
acsearch check or
CNG e-auction check; hopefully they yield a few dozen more than I haven't already found.
The
average provenance date of the 500 coins locked in so far is 1994 - i.e. based on the oldest reliable citation for each coin. For the next 60%, the
average provenance date is going to be much more recent as I expect the great majority won't result in a date much earlier than my own purchase, in 2012 or whenever. Of course the 500 already documented will, over time, be pushed back a
bit further by new finds. So there's
still progress to be made laboriously going through every single of the remaining major dealers. Very often new
provenance finds turn out to be intermediate e.g. I bought a coin in 2009, found a 1977
provenance, and later find a 1996.
Some coin
types are persistently more difficult to recognise than others, especially
types that generally come uniformly struck. Also tiny coins (
sestertii). Some are generally easier e.g. bronzes with typical
flan flaws.
In general, regardless of condition, my own
collection coins are on
average appreciably better struck, better
style, and on larger flans than the market-average for a given condition for a given
type. I guess that's my own built up expertise in choosing coming into play. But in those few cases when I persistently recognise that not to be the case for a given
type that signals to me that I need to divest my current coin - I'm ok in having worn coins, so long as my worn coin is better than the flock. But I'm not ok having even well preserved coins if my GVF-EF example is persistently the ugliest one on the market. It's gotta go.
You get to know your own coins pretty well through provenancing
work.