It just occurred to me today that there's usually very little info on auction houses (or dealers) when they go out of business. They just stop and usually no one says anything. Granted, most dealers are one-person affairs so it's understandable that they fall off the radar but auctioneers tend to have sizable staffs. I'd be interested in hearing what went wrong, if anyone knows, with firms like Tkalec, Helios, UBS, Gemini, etc. The most famous numismatic firm's demise is probably Numismatic Fine Arts. They were a flashy, high-end auctioneer back in the 80's then went out of business in the 90's when its owner, Bruce McNall, went to jail for fraud. His story was turned into an interesting book I read a few years ago and which you can find on Amazon. A mini-documentary on him here Rasiel
Helios was a subsidiary/affiliate of Freeman and Sear, whose failure is well known. I think Rob Freeman claimed that shenanigans by the manager of the Helios subsidiary was largely to blame for the cash crunch and bad dealings that occurred in the U.S. company, but that story has been challenged by others.
From the "outside", Gemini sales didn't seem to be performing well the last few years, IMO. My sense is that HJB pulled the plug. I don't think scheduling the sales late in the week at NYINC particularly helped performance (buyers had less money to spend by then), and rather high estimates in the final couple years probably didn't encourage active bidding. However, Gemini was more a "brand" than a firm. Like Triton.
https://www.amazon.com/Fun-While-La...ile+it+lasted&qid=1562449731&s=gateway&sr=8-1 When I first recommended this book here on Coin Talk, Amazon was selling them for less than they added for slowest postage. I guess that it is still worth the 2019 price but we all miss the good old days. Speaking of the good old days, I still enjoy most of the coins I bought from NFA and have resold few. I regret that Bruce McNall abandoned coins for a life in Hockey, Hollywood and Jail. Most of the dealers I patronized in the earliest days have passed away. Of the ones currently active, many are over 70. I have no reason to believe that the hobby will die before I do. Old people don't like change and change is the only thing that we can count on to continue.
For auction houses from 1980 and earlier I recommend Ancient Coin Auction Catalogues 1880-1980 by the late John Spring. I thought it was a bargain at $95; the book now sells for $35 from a well-known numismatic bookseller. I hope someone is organizing information for the period 1981-2010-ish. A lot of the later stuff is online, although increasingly behind paywalls.
You can find copies for less than $4 if you go through bookfinder.com: https://www.bookfinder.com/search/?...20in%20the%20land%20of%20fame%20and%20fortune I, too, recommend this book. It has a lot of interesting things to say about Deutsche Bank and Leu Numismatics, among others.
I use the Augustus Coins web site. It is a great resource! What I liked about Spring's book is that the author supplies a photo and a bit of text. Without a picture and a story my brain refuses to "download" the information into my memory. I also like to know the human, rather than the corporate, author of the catalogs. Few catalogs name their author. Lanz does (or did). People often tell me who wrote particular catalogs, but it never gets written down. A historian is needed to reconnect the firms with the people. Valentinian's text for Helios is "The firm opened in 2008. Coins are very well-photographed in full color, without enlargements, illustrated throughout. Descriptions are in German. Coins tend to be moderate value with numerous usual high-value exceptions. There are interesting collections offered, not just nice coins. Their Byzantine coins include excellent AE." This is an excellent summary of the catalogs but lacks a story. Without a narrative I tend to get lost in the details when I am not in front of my computer. The Helios story is a side note in Hillel Aron's LA Weekly story at https://www.laweekly.com/the-downfa...customers-of-millions-and-lost-a-bronze-head/ . This article quotes Rob Freeman accusing Helios of "... improprieties of some significance ...". Apparently [four] Athenian decadrachms ... bought by Helios’ managing director ... and at least one ... later turned out to be a fake" according to Ira Goldberg. The Helios web site is long gone. Luckily archive.org saved it at https://web.archive.org/web/20111010143122/http://helios-numismatik.de/detail_html.asp?nid=265&lid=1 . By December 2014 the web site goes dark. The Helios web site never named who was behind the firm. That information is given in Freeman and Sear FPL 13. I'd like to quote that information here, but if I do this thread may become a top search hit for the name. Both employees of Helios now work for Solidus, and they may not want Goldberg and Freeman's accusations as top hits for their names.
I don't know about the end of Tkalec's auction sales. I never bought from Anton Tkalec. You'll want to read Peter Landesman's article for The Atlantic, "The Curse of the Sevso Silver". Unfortunately the article is mostly based on the words of Michel van Rijn, who hated Tkalec.
I used to buy from Frank L. Kovacs many years ago and he kind of mentored me. I got out of the hobby for 25 years and when I came back in 2017 he appears to no longer be in business. Perhaps he just retired. Recently they named a numismatic library after him at Stanford. https://library.stanford.edu/news/2016/06/transformative-numismatic-donation
For the most part he is not actively dealing but he is still active and still assembling esoteric collections. I have sold him a couple coins this year. The old saying goes, 'if Frank buys something from you it was uber rare and priced at a fraction of what it should have been'! I think he trolls about here anonymously, but I dont remember.
Regarding UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland): the bank decided in 2001 to concentrate their efforts in their core competence parts of their business (banking and investments). For this reason they divested from their numismatic activities which were taken over by Sincona. https://muenzenwoche.de/UBS-trennt-sich-von-ihrem-Numismatikgeschaeft/?id=520&type=n
I appreciate the sleuthing on these firms guys. Learned quite a bit! I'll contribute a little anecdote of my own. I had the pleasure to meet David Sear at his hone several years ago and one of questions was regarding Freeman & Sear. I assumed that's where he "worked" at but it turns out that he had no ongoing relationship with them. It's just one of those setups where your name has become a brand and can be "leased". Not sure if they actually ever worked together. Back in the 80's and 90's Frank Sternberg was another big one that just went off the radar. I've no idea if this was just a single guy named Frank who ran auctions or was an actual staffed company but he/them put out catalogs with high quality material for many years. More recently there was a company called Pecunem that seemed to be prolific in the low- to mid-tier material then *POOF* gone. Münzen und Medaillen turned out to be the zombie of the numismatic world dying and being reborn several times with different management teams. Finally, back in the day, 50-100 years ago, there were the equivalents of NAC or what Heritage is for U.S. coins. Names like Leo Hamburg, Naville Ars Classica, Jacob Hirsch, Adolph Cahn and others were mostly based in Germany. Their top talent being Jewish by the mid-1930's conditions had deteriorated to the point where it was impossible to continue business. Some reopened in Switzerland and some I think simply gave up. Rasiel
Pecumem was the brand name of the auctioning platform they used. The auction house was Gitbud and Naumann and then Gitbud withdrew will Naumann moved to Austria at some point in time. I don't know if they had a dispute or whatever...
I bought half a dozen coins from Tkalec when I started collecting ancient coins. He had one or two big auctions per year and many more e-auctions. He sent me an auction catalog with a large selection of RR denarii (2008 I think) that I used to see what a coin should look like. The e-auctions were in my price range. I bought the L.IVLI / XVI coin below from him. A coin club member did not think it was authentic. I contacted Tkalec and received a prompt answer. Mr. Tkalec said the coin was genuine, he cleaned it, but would refund my money if I wanted. I kept the coin and bought several more from him. The Tkalec web site is still on line, but has no coins offered or any auction dates listed. There is a list of auction companies that has mostly active links. http://www.coinstkalec.ch/home/homeNew.aspx This is one of the closed sites I miss.
This is important and happens many times. I understand however Sincona is actually formed from the coin division of UBS, it wasn't a separate company that "took over" UBS coins, but was the part of UBS which traded collectible and bullion coins and that was separated ("hived off") from UBS and thus became Sincona. Many supposedly defunct auction houses aren't that at all. The business continues and often with the same staff and the same offices but no longer under the larger brand because it wasn't adding brand value and but did add administrative hassle. Sotheby's = Morton and Eden now. Glendining's = Dix Noonan Webb now. Both are at or adjacent to the same locations in Mayfair that they were based at when they were Sotheby's and Glendining's, and there was staff continuity. Gemini = Harlan J. Berk and so on. Separating out the coin business not only simplifies things at corporate level but may also help to limit liabilities if there's an issue with export controls or fakes. It also allows the separated coin firm to have different terms of sale. Some firms get out of ancients but continue with moderns because it requires totally different expertise. The venerable London firm of Seaby is now CNG, except in London where in 2019 staff still answer the phone with "Seaby". Going way back in history the same happened. Otto Helbing was a large German Jewish run coin auction house whose activities were taken over by Karl Kress in the late 1930s. Only in 1944 did he change the name to "Karl Kress" but he continued the numbering which went from Helbing 85 to Kress 86. For a long time his auctions also have "formerly Otto Helbing" on the cover. Good luck in searching for Kress auctions 1 to 85! As for Tkalec and such like, many small houses are run by one lead and an admin person. People retire. It isn't that the "auction house" is defunct but more that it was never a "house" to begin with rather it was a sole-trader type of business with never any plans for continuity after retirement and perhaps even run from home (their home was the "house"). Elsewhere on CoinTalk in the last week someone was asking about John Jencek and lamenting his absence from the NY show. Guess what? He retired to Czechia and doesn't do coin retail any more. His book library went off to Stanford University in California in 2015 - it already incorporated the Frank Kovacs library by that point and Kovacs is another "auction house" that retired though one still seems him around NYINC. I do understand that Jencek is still involved in wholesale numismatics but anyone who disposes of his books isn't planning to resume retail. Probably off on a yacht on a Czech lake right now. Cases of a large company with significant staff (an "auction house") really shutting down are rare, and the Freeman and Sear and NFA examples are exceptions that reinforce the general rule: in both those cases it was malfeasance that caused them to stop: they didn't put down the shutters voluntarily. No-one except a retiring sole trader just stops a business that is a going concern. M.AVF RVS is a very rare type in any condition. Well done.
