I am trialling new ticket-coin combo photos as below. I will need to adjust the process for normal smaller coins but this is a start. In Crawford order.
This is very nice, putting your coins and tags on old engravings! I'm taking a little liberty with your picture. If you make a photo (not a scan), often the result is unnaturally blue because of the surrounding light. You can easily edit your photo (I'm using Irfanview) and turn the blue down to make the photo more natural. Then I make it a bit lighter and give it some more contrast in order to let the coins speak for themselves loud and clearly. You have the coins yourself, you can compare the colors to those of the photo. To post it on a forum like this, the picture should be a bit narrower. Here's an example, it's not perfect. Feel free to hate it, I'm just showing some possibilities.
yes the coins are more yellow / green / red and less blue! This was more a documentation process than photography - normal i photograph my coins against 18% grey backgrounds to get the coloure right. no I didn't do the engraving myself! The engravings are 470 years old dating to about 1550. Enea Vico. I have a lot of old books like these. So they are Renaissance period.
What is the ultimate purpose here, Andrew? For your website, or just for fun? I like the idea of including photos of tags with the coins, that way if the tags are lost in 100 years, they won’t be totally lost.
Auctioneers and dealers routinely discard tags. Some, carelessly. Some systematically. No one has ever received an old tag from a NAC sale for example, unless you specifically ask. I go to a great deal of effort to make my own tickets (the round tickets written in pencil) and to collect the information and the old tickets. I have realised that I must memorialise the tickets in photographs, both my own carefully written tickets as well as those from prior collectors or sellers. Because if I do not, that information will probably be lost forever. Even where the information is transcribed into an auction description, it may not be done so in the way I would like, for example to emphasise the importance of one or other provenance. Or it may omit the name of a famous (to me) or important (to you) prior collector which may be the most significant thing in the provenance. The Crawford 36/1 As in my pictures was owned by "von Kaufmann". That means nothing when it's written as such in an auction description. But my description on my little tag makes clear that Geheimrat von Kaufmann was a Privy Counciller to Kaiser Wilhelm II and died in 1908 (in fact he was the Prussian minister of Finance under the Empire). So writing "von Kaufmann collection" says almost nothing but my ticket says a lot. Whilst it is easy to think one can control these matters when one sells ones coins, really it's a sausage machine. You cannot control how an auctioneer will present a $300 coin or even a $3000 coin. And you may be dead. So, put the information in a photo.
This is a real shame. I recently managed to hunt down provenances for several coins by sending scans of old tickets from the 90s to a previous collector who was able to extend the provenances as many as 15 years by decoding a series of codes and monograms written on those old tickets. That would never have been possible without actually having those old tickets in-hand. I also managed to trace a coin that was previously only documented as "ex Boston MFA" back to the original 1932 bequeathment that the museum received it from, another provenance hit only possible because the original ticket was included with the coin. One thing I've begun doing every time I find an undocumented provenance for a coin purchased at auction is to go on ACSearch and add that provenance to the comments for the coin. Ideally any future collectors will get either my envelopes and notes on the coin or at least my digital notes and provenance scans but failing that the notes will also be there on ACSearch.
good idea re Acsearch. I would say over 50% of my coins have never been at auction in the period since Acsearch started - either retail buys or from a pre-2002 auction or from an off-acsearch auction. The physical tickets are key, now including my physical tickets which I make as informative as their space will allow. There's a lot of merit in making the tickets as lovely as possible as nice things don't get thrown away. Hence the custom stamp on my tix and they are made of thick card and I try my best to cram as much information as possible, as you can see from the above photos. Invoices etc are generally too big so one has to rely on a coin sized record that'll fit in a 2x2. As well as this experiment I am gradually adding provenance information to my photos on Flickr. But there's no substitute for collectors treasuring the physical tickets and for dealers always passing them on.
I just got one of your coins CNG E Auction 443 Lot 443. I wonder how long dealers will continue destroying the history of their coins. They must notice as I do that coins with some form of provenance sell better than those that don't. I have noticed however that some dealers do advertise the provenance of their coins and I have received in some cases the original tags. The one thing we as a group should try to encourage the digitization of older pre 2000 Auction cats and FPLs. This guy just came in I am keeping both the CNG and McCabe tickets.
For the same reason you created your personalised tags, I like using envelopes in the (vain?) hope that they may stay with the coins long after I'm gone. Most tags and flips will be thrown out. But I think more than a few of us have coins that came with envelopes from decades ago.
Here some examples from my collection about old tags and provenance: Carausius (286-293) Æ antoninianus, Rouen D\ IMP C.CARAVSIVS AVG R\ [TEMP]ORVM F RIC 679 ex F. Baldwin - ex Percy Webb (tag from his collection) Aureolus in name of Postumus Ae antoninianus, Milan D\ IMP C POSTVMVS P F AVG R\ SALVS AVG / P RIC 382 - Elmer 618 Ex Münzen & Medaillen GmbH n. 45 (2017) - Ex Frank Sternberg AG (Zurich) - Ex Marcus R. Weder collection (with his tag) Aurelianus Ae Antoninianus, Milan (3 officina) D\ IMP AVRELIANVS AVG; busto a destra radiato e corazzato. R\ VIRTVS MILITVM, T (ex coll. '900 franco/belga, ex B.B. - ex T.W. - ex Sasu Prado Falque Encheres (2/2017) - ex french collection '900 - from P&P Santamaria fixed price list this is the P&P Santamaria Catalogue and the coin is the lot. n. 1185: I love the work of Andrew! A great idea
I like your tag & coin combo pics. The old artwork is a nice touch too. I like to take combo pics. The coin and bronze shell arrived this week. They are pictured next to similar items in Le monete dell'Italia antica by Garrucci, Raffaele, 1812-1885 and Ancient Scale Weights by Hendin. There are several theories on why bronze shells were produced: scale weights, small change in Aes Rude days and votive items. You can find Garrucci on line here: https://archive.org/details/lemonetedellital00garr/page/n4 Here I am trying to made the marks on this bar fragment match a dolphin with not much luck.
I was at the Harvard Museum of Natural History today for Olivia’s 6th birthday, and noticed that the curators kept the old minuscule tags for these bugs: Thought you all would appreciate. Also, Livy and her brother, Nico:
