Reputable Dealers and Price Guides

Hello all and Happy Holidays!

As a new CT member with an interest in Ancient Greek coins I would like to get some information on reputable dealers/auction houses dealing in ancients. I'm a long-time U.S. coin collector, so I'm familiar and have dealt with Heritage as well as Ebay.

Also, is there any guide to prices? I've watched Ebay and Heritage auctions for several months and winning bid prices seem to be all over the place! I realize there are probably not relatively standardized price guides like for U.S. coins, but how can I find ball-park fair prices?

And while I'm at it, can someone please give me some information on the Strike and Surface grades on NGC certified coins? Why do some certified coins have the Strike and Surface numbers and others don't? And what does fine style mean?

Thanks in advance.

 

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Price guides? Nope, not that I know of... at least not other than auction results and recent sales.

NGC grading is pretty routinely derided here, and with good reason. Generally speaking, I find coins that rate at least 3/5 on their scale to be pleasing, and lesser coins to be... less pleasing.

Fine style means that the engraver did a particularly artistic job on the dies for this coin. You should learn to judge this yourself.

As far as reputable dealers, there are plenty on this site, and a lot more on vcoins.com. I would not recommend eBay as a starting point for a beginning collector, until you get reasonably good at spotting fakes.

 

Avoid eBay like the corpse of a rat infested with mutant herpes and rectal bubonic plague. At least until you are good enough to recognize a cast or a fantasy piece from a real coin.

Avoid Heritage because they only deal in slabbed ancients. Nothing says chump like spending $100 on a common coin that can be had for $35 or $40 raw from a reputable dealer all because it is encased in a bit of plastic. That dog don't hunt. Not to mention. The serious issues with NGC ancients which I'm sure others here can enlighten you on, such as grossly overgading ancient coins.

Here are the names of a few dealers and websites where people who truly know ancients will sell you a raw genuine ancient coin at a decent price:

Ancient Imports
Civitas Galleries
Coolcoins.com --that one takes you to @Ken Dorney's vcoins.com store. Vcoins in general is a good place to get coins.
FORVM Shop

As far as auction houses, some are more crooked than a barrel of snakes, and their offerings are not even worth a bucket of warm spit. But here are a few who are straight as an arrow to get your feet in the game. These people know their business and you can bid with confidence.

cngcoins.com
Agora auctions.com

Any of these dealers and auction houses are good. Why it's like shooting fish in a barrel with how easy it is to buy nice genuine ancient coins from those places. Not to say that they never make a mistake, after all they ain't Jesus or the Buddha, but their mistakes are rare and you get lifetime authenticity guarantee.

Finally, Merry Christmas and Happy Saturnalia to you too.

 

There is a guide to prices in CNG search archives, just type the keywords of the coin you are interested, for example (Trajan bridge) or in the case of Greek coins (Phasos nymph) and you will see the last 15 years of sales prices for that particular coin, obviously the last couple of years are the the ones to take notice of. If your not sure let me know the coins your interested in and I will guide you through it.

 

Having coins evaluated for strike and surface is an extra cost service. Many without it are bulk submissions of common coins simply not worth the price of a full service slab. Ancient dies were not cloned from hubs like modern ones so each was its own work of art. Some are better than others. The Fine Style notation is a very rudimentary attempt to recognize this and say the coin is better than some in that respect.

There is a price guide of sorts for Roman Imperial coins I can recommend but few will agree. Before he started slabbing for NGC, David Vagi wrote a book Coinage and History of the Roman Empire (2 volumes). Any prices given are out of date now but it is good for relative prices (Nero sells for more than Vespasian but less than Otho). He gave general prices for common types and then listed special ones separately. The book is far, far from complete but complete would be twenty feet thick and cost $10,000 (conservative estimates). Also, the book does nothing for Greek or Roman Republican (read the title - it covers coins of the Empire). He have prices in three grades but now he slabs coins in 200 grades (Poor through Mint State times five level of strike times five levels of surface but most of us think these numbers are inadequate to cover the task). If you allow two levels 'Fine Style' or not (what about sort-of fine and really great style?) and other factors that will take a while to understand, you soon realize why many of us prefer not to grade coins beyond "I like it" and "I'll pass". If there were a complete price guide to ancient coins, I fear it would require as much expertise to use it as to write it.

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=david+vagi
Currently the Amazon listing offers used copies of the two volumes separately as well as together as issued. If you are buying these, be sure you know what you are buying. The History volume is a good book but will do nothing for your price guide desires. It will, however add greatly to your understanding of the coins and the civilization that made them. Don't pay $300. It is a good book but not That good. Amazon can get hilarious when pricing out of print books. Others sell them as well.
https://www.vcoins.com/en/stores/ch...story_of_the_roman_empire/107059/Default.aspx

 

Another possibility is the much derided Handbook of Roman Imperial Coins by David Van Meter. Limiter, yes, but still a good introduction. But whether you go for the Vagi or the Van Meter, the best place to start looking for a copy is bookfinder.com

 

I would like to second the recommendation for v-coins. It's not a dealer, it's a site where multiple vetted dealers sell coins and it's searchable by key words. Moreover, they have auctions in addition to fixed-price items.

https://www.vcoins.com/en/coins/ancient-2.aspx

Some reputable and knowledgeable dealers I worked with include:

William Rosenblum, who has fixed price lists and periodic auctions (2-4/year). If you are into Judean/Biblical coins, this is especially the dealer for you, but he has a decent selection of ancient coins in general:

http://rosenblumcoins.com/

Frank Robinson, who has mailbid auctions about 4 times a year. He has very low starting bids, offers friendly advice about bidding, has a great sense of humor, and is always very professional in his business dealings.

http://fsrcoin.com/

Harlan J. Berk. Yes, the stuff's expensive, but of the finest quality. One of the most respected numismatic firms in the business and their catalogs are extremely educational. They offer coins at fixed prices, through buy-or-bid sales, and through auctions.

https://www.hjbltd.com/#!/department/ancient-coins

I think CNG was mentioned. Everything I said about Harlan Berk is true for CNG.

https://www.cngcoins.com/

 

Thanks, Roman Collector! I checked out William Rosenbaum's site and he has a lot of great Judaean coins.

Sorry, I think I posted this twice!

 

He has hundreds of items in stock that he simply hasn't had the time to list. If you are looking for something in particular, just E-mail him and ask and he'll happily send you the information.

 

Thanks to all for great advice and excellent information.

One of my greatest concerns, as I dip a toe into ancients, is my inability to tell fake from authentic. Admittedly most of my U.S. coins are slabbed and therefore I have been looking more closely at NGC ancients than raw. But now with information on reputable dealers and auction houses I will look more closely at raw coins before making some buys.

How do you store your raw ancients? Do you just use flips?

About 35 years ago I purchased, on a whim at a coin show, a couple of ancients that I really liked, for the "look" and the age. It sounds like that's the right idea behind collecting ancients!

 

I use flips as to many others and even dealers. Some also use paper envelopes.

Basically the biggest enjoyment in ancients is to hold them and pretty much how ever you want.

Also all the rules you follow with moderns are thrown out the window.

 

I like 2x2 paper envelopes but SAFLIPs are popular choices as well. I don't recommend the small mylar window cardboard flips that many modern collectors use though, because many ancients are high relief and these can lead to contact marks and whatnot. An option is to look into trays, which are a bit bulkier but certainly are the most impressive option to look at. Abafil is a popular manufacturer for trays.

I think this is the best way to start out as long as you stick with good dealers.

 

Everyone dumps on eBay, usually for good reason. However, if you promise never to bid or spend more than $15 for a coin, at least not until after you've had about 5 or 10 years of ancient coin collecting experience under your belt, I will give you my blessing to buy some ancient coins from eBay. You will end up acquiring a lot of common late Roman bronzes (LRBs) and maybe even some common Greek bronzes in low-to-medium grade. This would actually serve as a pretty decent introduction to ancient coin collecting and give you the opportunity to discover where you main collecting interest lies. Most scam artists--I said "most," not "all"--aren't interested in ripping people off for $10 or $15; they're more likely to go for bigger fish.

Just remember the adage: "If an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is." I believe whoever first coined that phrase probably had eBay in mind, even if eBay didn't actually exist back then. If you see a Republican denarius in EF condition or a VF tetradrachm of Alexander the Great selling for $25, flee. But a worn silver antoninianus of Gordian III with some surface roughness for $15? Yes, that's possible.

 

As for prices, the best, up to date pricing of ancients is available via comparable auction sales on www.acsearch.com. Also, www.coinarchives.com is another auction results website. acsearch is a pay service (you can also search for free, but the results won't show prices), but well worth the price in my opinion.

Regarding storage, if you chose 2x2 flips, make sure they are the non-PVC variety, such as SAFEflips. PVCs can generate surface crud on ancient coins after prolonged storage.

 

I don't mean to open this can of worms, but it's something you should be aware of (and you can find numerous threads discussing this): NGC does not guarantee the authenticity of ancients (they're a good back stop and will likely catch most fakes, but being in an NGC slab doesn't garuntee authenticity)

 

Storage is a different matter for those with 30 coins than it is when you get 3000. I reluctantly moved to paper envelopes when I could no longer carry my collection in the trays. For easy access and fun playing, I still like the trays. This photo was taken a few years ago. I was younger then, too.

 

This site has a wealth of useful ideas for storing and displaying ancient coins. Here are two very good threads on this topic:

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/ancients-organization-and-attribution-at-work.250251/

https://www.cointalk.com/threads/how-do-you-store-your-ancients.275050/

 

LOL. Your "great" grandson is a handsome little bugger.

 

While I agree that Heritage's recent decision to sell only slabbed coins is unfortunate, I wouldn't totally eliminate them from consideration for your purchases. Occasionally a hidden gem can be found among the slabbed coins -- a coin that has been overlooked because the slab prevents a really good examination of the coin's condition.

As Sallent notes, you don't want to spend $100 for a slabbed coin when a coin in similar condition can be found unslabbed for half the price. But if you have the opportunity to examine the slabbed Heritage coin in person, you might find it has features that other similar types don't have, and that would make it worthwhile to purchase it and break it out of the slab. This happened to me recently when my dealer saw a Hadrian travel aureus that was not well presented in the slab but was in fact much better than the catalog and online pictures indicated. I ended up with it at (what I consider to be) a bargain price. Here's a thread on that coin, with slabbed/unslabbed pictures: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/hadrian-aureus-a-makeover.284246/#post-2526632

I have a bigger issue with Heritage's recent shift in orientation: their willingness to overlook obvious tooling and re-engraving in their descriptions of coins they auction. This is a significant dereliction of professional responsibility (in my opinion) and has made me very wary of the coins they list in their auctions.