Seeking ID for 1970s, possibly much older ticket

Attached is a ticket that I'm looking for an ID for. The coin - a Roman Republican denarius issued by Publius Satrienus with a she wolf on reverse - was purchased by the Southern California collector (S.C. Collection) sometime between the late 1960s and late 1970s from an unknown US dealer. All I have is the attached ticket picture (all 1970s vintage except the "$500" which is modern. Any ideas of whose hand writing this is would be much appreciated.

I should note that the dark red writing SATRIENA-1 781A 26.00 was probably written by the 1970s dealer. The black writing may be a much older ticket from a prior seller or owner.

Andrew McCabe

 

Log in or Sign up to hide this ad.

The red writing from a 70's dealer is perhaps Joel Malte? I see a strong similarity between the number 8, and one of the 2s in your envelope is a dead match for one of the 2s he wrote on this tag. He also wrote only a reference for the coin and the price in the tag below (in red), just like he only wrote a reference and price in yours (in red). The similarity is too much, I think.

Thankfully he signed and dated the reverse of the tag below, so the ID was a piece of cake.

Anyway, can't help you with the other writing, but I think it's safe to say your coin was an Ex. Joel Malte at some point.

 

That's very interesting, as I mentioned other tickets are known from the 1970s with the same red text on different backgrounds belonging to the same "S.C." collection which is generally understood to stand for Southern California. That leaves open several possibilities, one being that Joel Malter was an intermediate who purchased from other sources and sold to S.C. (but why sign your own tickets??), and one (unlikely in my view) that these are all somehow coins that once belonged to Malter (but why sign your own tickets???). A third possibility is that the writing is indeed the S.C. collector who then wrote "Joel Malter 1-23-75" to indicate who he bought the coin from, i.e. that this isn't Malter's handwriting at all but that of the collector. Regrettably this seems most likely, as the name is likely a source, written by buyer, who then wrote the actual price paid. The NFA ticket is in different handwriting akin to how my ticket has different black handwriting and that would make sense as a seller handwriting tho this coin passed via Malter. It was suggested to me on Forum that the black handwritten ticket was ex Superior; that drew a blank - I checked Newman. There's no Malter specific material on Newman, but perhaps I don't know where to look. Thank you for this.

Right now I still think your coin has the collector's handwriting in red, indicating he bought from Malter for $79.50, and Malter obtained the coin from N.F.A. for a price probably significantly less than the $75 that N.F.A. marked.

More red painted S.C. tickets would help. And/or a sample signature of Joel Malter!

 

I have by the way updated my records with this discussion. Record everything, one never knows when it may become relevant. Still thinking on this. Why didn't S.C. write where he got the coin from on my ticket for example?

 

You blew my mind. I never realized my coin might have an additional provenance link to another collection. I'm intrigued at the idea that your coin and mine might have come from the same collection and I want to know more about whether it was Malter or SC who wrote with the red ink. Keep me updated with what you find, and I will also see what I can find this weekend when I have more time to research this.

PS: Here is the coin that came with the ticket.

 

Deleted to avoid spreading erroneous information

 

They 100% definitely came from the same collection because multiple different tickets are known from other collectors with the same red writing and they came from the same source who cited the same SC collection. If one has a ticket with that red handwriting then it's an S.C. coin. So far the known certain time window extends from Hall Park McCullough in 1967 and the Knobloch in 1978, both Stack's sales - S.C. coins are known throughout that date range but none earlier or later are known to me at this time. This btw is my only S.C. with the red handwriting; you have one, others have some too. The S.C. coins were dispersed about five years ago, all privately at retail.

It still leaves two valid possibilities. That S.C. is the red hand. Or that Joel Malter sold a lot of coins retail to S.C., perhaps acting as auction agent, and Malter is the red hand.

 

That's not a Malter ticket, that's an RBW ticket! He always wrote who he bought the coins from in this style on such an envelope.

It's a Rindge coin, ex Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Frederick Hastings Rindge Collection (1857–1905). The collection was put on loan to Boston Museum of Fine Arts during Rindge's lifetime cf. 1902 curator's report "we have the Frederick Hastings Rindge Collection as a loan, of which 1105 specimens are exhibited, the majority being Roman of the Republican period", and remained there until the late 20th century, and was dispersed eventually in 1985 by Malter.

One gets to know the handwriting and ticket styles of many different collector in time. My own duplicates tickets are widely enough dispersed that many Republican collectors will recognise them also by now.

 

I did find this.....for sure a match to the "signature" on mine dated to 5 years earlier than mine, and same ink type. Whether it's SC or Malter I'll leave to others to guess.

 

Yes!

Now you have a ticket with a mysterious background (typewriting and sulphur yellow paper) that needs investigating.



Any ex S.C. coins with tickets are very desirable. The dispersal at retail of the collection about five years ago was not via the internet, so one had to have the luck of being in the right place to acquire examples.

 

This one is from my collection. I've also always wondered who the previous collector was. Here's the coin in question:


I'll inquire with the dealer I purchased the coin from. I believe he purchased a group of several denarii from this same collector all with 70s provenances.

 

You likely won't get any luck at all enquiring who the collector was. If it's known, the vendors aren't saying. I believe the collector is unknown to numismatics. It's likely an estate sale, perhaps of someone who passed many years ago, and the choice to go old-school retail suggests a desire to maintain a low profile. There may well be an discreet agent between the owners and whichever dealer first touched the coins, so that no information is passed down. I bought quite a few good coins and couldn't prise out any information, other than that the collection is "SC" which I later discovered to mean southern California.

 

Well, I'd like to thank @Andrew McCabe for at least helping me to fill another bit of history for my coin. I now know much more than I did before, namely that:

1. My coin was probably sold as part of an over the mail auction by Numismatics Fine Arts in the early 1970s... (this company would later be involved in a major criminal scandal for smuggling stolen antiquities).

2) At some point the coin came into the pocession of dealer Joel L. Malter, and he sold it for $79.50 in 1975

3) SC bought the coin from Joel Malter in 1975.

4) This coin ended up being sold by Civitas Galleries in 2015 to me in Florida.

So this coin has gone in 50 years from the hands of a convicted smuggler in California, to an unknown collector probably in California too, to Joel Malter also in California, to SC somewhere in southern California, to Civitas Galleries in Middleton, Wisconsin, to some collector in South Florida (me).

I'm sure there's more story to it, but not bad...right? Most non-expensive Republican denarii don't have that kind of provenance (most don't have any).

 

Malter bought the name "Numismatic Fine Arts" from Edward Gans and founded this iteration of it in the early to mid 70s. I wouldn't be surprised if the collector simply knew Joel before NFA and marked it down as "Joel Malter", much like you occasionally see early CNG tickets marked by collectors as "Victor England".

 

Yes. Malter = NFA during 1970s.
Malter does not = NFA during the later bad times. He sold on the name sometime late 1970s. So to update Sallent's list on two points:
- NFA/Malter were the same during the time his coin was bought so adding Joel Malter on the back meant "I bought the coin from Joel Malter (whose company name was NFA)". I'd actually forgotten this until I looked at some NFA/Malter catalogues from the 1970s this afternoon.
- Malter's son Michael continued with Malter until quite recently. It has nothing to do with the NFA which had troubles in the 1990s.

One point this shows is that it is the named principal that matters, not the name of the company. Gans, Malter > reliable NFA. The 1980s NFA > great coins but dodgy business.

Another general point I'd like to make is that there is no source book for provenances apart from John Spring's magnificent work on ancient coin auction houses, but that focuses more on the 1910s to 1950s. There's no directory to answer questions like "whose is the red handwriting". One just has to get together with other collectors and try and piece together the information as we are doing right now. Sometimes it will involve wrong assumptions or errors.

I have further information about the "signatures" in red. I have now seen more tickets with the same handwriting. One has "Knobloch" written in the same red handwriting in the same position on the back of the ticket. Unless Joel Malter was in the habit of trying to forge Fred Knobloch's name, I think this decisively proves that the red handwriting is the S.C. collector who sometimes wrote who bought the coin from on the back of the ticket. And sometimes not.

I mentioned above that S.C. coins are highly respected. The S.C. collection coins I own include
- one ex the Ashmolean museum which I know because 19th century electrotypes are known of my coin with an Ashmolean mark (I have one of the electrotypes which I keep with the ticket)
- three Knobloch coins (Stack's 1978), one of which was a Max Bahrfeldt coin
- two Haeberlin coins (Cahn-Hess 1933)
- one Hall Park McCullough (Stack's 1967)

These are awesome provenances and shows the quality of coins in the collection. I only wish I had more. Anyone who wishes to part with any coins accompanied by those envelopes with the special red writing please let me know

 

I show front and back of the ticket with Knobloch written on it, in the same handwriting as Joel Malter in an earlier post. S.C. Collector. But now we know something extra. The handwriting in BLUE is Knobloch's. So this can now be used to attribute tickets with such blue handwriting. And so on.

I would be very pleased to find what Joel Malter's handwriting looked like as perhaps it looked like my ticket in black (in which case it's his own ticket). Or perhaps not.

 

I bought coins from Joel Malter in the late 60's when he was using his name for the business but that Box 777 address. For a while in that period, he employed a young Bruce McNall. The link below has a lot of history/memories from that day.
https://www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v09n24a02.html

 

That one is simple. Often people forget. I have many coins in my collection cataloged as "Provenance - Unknown". Many years ago a lot of us didn't really care where we got our coins once we had them. Provenance is much more important and of interest now than in those heady days. And what to note for coins obtained on Ebay? The anonymous seller account name really doesn't mean much. They drop off after a while and you cant look them up if they are no longer registered.

 

I agree based on the new evidence, SC's handwriting was in red, and the Malter on the reverse of my ticket simply means SC bought my coin from NFA (Malter)on January 23, 1975 for $79.50.

I am so glad I never threw the ticket away as I originally wanted to do due to newbie stupidity (thinking it wasn't important or didn't mean anything). I now see what a mistake that would have been.

 

McNall was the dodgy part of NFA. Here's a non paywalled article from 2nd June 1994.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/biggest-coin-dealer-in-world-faces-bankruptcy-1419820.html

Totally agree. I've been going through ticket purgatory all this week trying to sort myself out. Once every three years or so I make magnificent efforts in getting my paperwork all in order. Yesterday I was hunting for a handwritten half inch diameter roundel written by the English Amateur Scholar from who I have a couple of aes grave he bought in the 1990s that were not part of the NAC 92 sale. Took me hours to locate it, during which time I discovered a lot of other lost tickets. The (dated) ticket is needed to prove a pre 2011 provenance for aes grave. I knew I put it "somewhere safe" (haven't we all done that). But I wanted to get it into my ticket filing system and write a McCabe ticket to accompany it. I keep my coins in Abafils in a protected location very far from home but the tickets stay at home, one reason being that I do not want any PVC in my coin storage vicinity so the tickets are kept separate from the coins.