Ancients => A Humble Addition to Thessaly-Ville!! => Pile-on!!

I guess both of these Seleucid Tets show show evidence of crystallization:

 

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I couldn't help myself with this portrait of Larissa. Too pretty to let go. Photo and text from CNG, don't have it in hand yet.



THESSALY, Larissa. Mid-late 4th century BC. Æ (17mm, 4.22 g, 6h). Head of the nymph Larissa right / Horse standing right, preparing to lie down. Rogers 288; BCD Thessaly II 390.2; HGC 4, 521. Good VF, dark green patina.

 

Larissa, Thessaly AR stater:
From the BCD collection and with a pedigree back to the Clarence S. Bement collection, January 28, 1924, Lot 918.

 

Hey guys, thanks for posting your sweet Larissa examples (both are amazing)

... yah, Larissa is one of my favourite animal-coin watering-holes (they have some amazing horses and lion examples, eh?)

 

That BCD sure did get around!

 

yah, I love his collection-stuff (it is certainly a nice feeling having the ol' BCD associated with one/some of your coins)

 

I wonder if he was the "Clio" of his day . Somewhere I read how many coins BCD amassed but I didn't bookmark it. Ardy would probably know.

 

How many total coins were in the BCD collection? How much value is added to a coin by its being ex BCD? I understand the desire to have coins of famous collections but a collection needs to be famous for something other than buying in bulk. Owners of large lots from BCD duplicates hope you will pay more for his lesser coins. How many BCD duplicates can the market absorb? Time will tell.

 

There are many many, very rough ex-BCD coins, and since his collection was dispersed, you can find them spread all over the market at this point. In my opinion, provenance is icing on the cake, and in BCD's case I don't think the provenance is anything particularly special. He was merely rich, and merely bought up everything he could. Buy the coin, not the provenance.

 

"But the coin not the provenance..."that's new!

 

When the coin is nice and it comes with interesting provenance, all the better!

As for "buy the coin, not the pedigree", there are some circumstances in which I would buy a lesser coin because of the pedigree. JQA comes to mind.

 

Ya I would buy one of Adams' culls so long as it can be proven to be his.

 

Around 50,000 coins was the figure that was provided in a Forvm post that quoted BCD, I believe. I can see an ex BCD coin from one of the sale catalogs now used as standard references commanding a premium, but 50,000 coins includes tons of duplicates in every possible grade you can imagine, and as far as those are concerned, a junky cull that is ex BCD is still a junky cull.

 

There was some discussion earlier about how many coins with JQA provenance he actually collected, how many were simply bought in bulk and tossed into a drawer, how many may have been collected by family members and not by him personally. Does anyone know any more about this? There's provenance and then there's provenance.