When reviewing the references for my mainland Greek coin
collection, I became starkly aware of the importance of the
BCD collection. Most of my
Greek coins were purchased prior to the publication of the
BCD collection, so there were obviously no references to be made there. Now, though, it's quite hard to provide an up-to-date reference without consulting
BCD. Actually, since there's no single corpus, but rather a number of catalogs from a handful of
auction houses, I suppose we should talk about the
BCD Collections (in plural).
The
Numiswiki topic
BCD is helpful and succinct, but there's little there to
help guide us to those resources, which are often characterized as the new
standard references.
I found a couple of helpful threads in this
Discussion Board, such as the one from Andrew McCabe discussing
BCD, the
man and
his library.
His comments
here. Molinari provided me a vital link by pointing to
acsearch.info for
BCD Akarnania. I thought I knew that
search engine, but I wasn't familiar with their
Auctions link or their Publications link. So I'll elaborate here what I learned:
acsearch.info has a list of catalogs (such as M&M Gmbh #23 for
BCD Akarnania) whose link for each pulls up a list of related lots in html, and not as a PDF. See the graphic at the end of this post. The site has a number of
BCD catalogs available without charge:
Numismatik
Lanz Auction 105 (
Corinth)
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=&category=1-2&company=86&auction=110Numismatik
Lanz Auction 111 (
Euboia)
https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?term=&category=1-2&company=86&auction=164Leu
Auction 90 (Olympia)
linkLHS
Auction 96 (
Peloponnesos)
linkMunzen & Medaillen
Auction 23 (Akarnania-Aetolia)
linknomos
Auction 4 (
Thessaly I)
linkNAC
Auction 55 (Lokris-Phokis)
linkCNG Triton IX (
Boiotia)
linkCNG Mail Bid Sale 81
Part 2 (
Peloponnesos II)
linkCNG Triton XV (
Thessaly II)
link There are other, smaller sales (such as the 'further offering of
BCD Peleponnesos' in
CNG MBS 82, and in their Electronic
Auctions, such as the Achaian League coinage in EA 221).
However, sales with more than 1000 lots are not fully available on
acsearch without a
PRO subscription. This impacts
BCD Peloponnesos I, II, and possibly others. You can
still search for a specific lot, but cannot have a nice, sequentially-numbered list of lots above lot #1000.
UPDATE to UPDATE:
BCD Euboia (
Lanz Auction 111) is NO LONGER available at
http://www.lanzauctions.com/catalogs/111/a111.htm. Also: There are 'further offerings of
BCD Boiotia' in
CNG 72, 73,
Triton X, and 75. These lots are not in catalogs dedicated exclusively to
BCD, but have lots from other
collections mixed in.
issuu.com has an online pdf version of the
nomos 4 and
Triton XV catalogs. You may be able to find some catalogs online at the
auction house websites, such as
CNG, but I haven't been successful in getting any that I could not find elsewhere, and some issues are missing (like
CNG 81 and 82, and
Triton IX).
I have not investigated
coinarchives.com except to say that it, too, has online catalogs, in html and by lot, like
acsearch.info, but this almost always requires a
PRO subscription.
I have also not yet checked out
sixbid for its
auction archive, which I have only now discovered
(here) except to see if they
had the
Lanz auctions (they do not).
The more I look, the more sites I find. Another site with 'closed
Auctions' is
biddr.
Still, I did not find any new
BCD catalogs.
I have the hardcopy catalogs for
CNG 81 (Peloponessos II),
CNG 82 (further Perloponessos),
Triton IX (
Boiotia) and
Triton XV (
Thessaly II), should anyone need a reference from those
auctions. I wish I
had held on to my early nomos catalogs; I
had a
standard reference without knowing it!