I've noticed several coins this year from the so-called "Crescent collection" being sold by CNG in their E-auctions. The coins range from Greek to Roman Republican, Imperial and provincial and in silver and bronze. Does anyone know anything about this collection, such as who assembled it, where, and when? See, for example this listing:
Probably one of those “collections” where any Google searches bring you right back to either the same auction listing, or to a coin talk thread asking if anybody knows it...
That happened to me when I tried to find any information on the "Vitangelo Collection." A dozen auction listings that just say "Vitangelo Collection." Two or three Cointalk threads, including my own, and that's about it on the vast expanses of Google. I honestly feel like some of these collections are so-named to convince buyers that they are buying something with a "named provenance" - which to be fair they are, but that's like saying that a coin is from the Hotwheelsearl Collection, which means nothing.
I also named my collection. I named it for my wife to thank her for letting me buy all these coins, though she wasn't so impressed... I've also been tempted to self-publish my own book with images of many of my coins. Then I could say that I have a ton of plate coins!
I had a similar question about coins from the "Mercury Collection" that I won in a CNG auction, so I wrote the company and asked if they could give me any further information. Bill Dalzell wrote back to me the following: "The Mercury Group Collection" is simply the name given by the collector who consigned the coins for his own collection. He did not wish for his real name to be included. As an aside, at CNG, a pedigree reading "From the ... Collection" indicates that this coin is coming *directly* from that collection, whereas 'Ex ... Collection' would indicate that it has passed through another in between."
Maybe you should ask Freeman and Sear? They are mentioned in the pedigree. This is not as if the auctioneer had mentioned no provenance at all, like for the unpublished and unique aureus of Aurelian and Vabalathus that appeared suddenly on the market in 2019 and was auctioned in January 2020, w/o any question asked. The kind of coin minted in Antioch which is most likely to be found not far from there, in NW Syria for example... BTW anybody knows what is the "Anabasis Collection" or the "Boutos Collection, formed in the 1970s and 1980s" ?
