Recently acquired this Nero sestertius which came with an old Spink-tab from an earlier sale. I am hoping for a response from Spink itself, but thought I could ask here in the meantime - if anyone have any experience with older Spink sales-tabs? Can the tab say anything about the time of the earlier Spink sale? Or perhaps the item number on the tab's reverse? Thanks for any insight about this!
Hand writing is John Pett at Spink. Tickets like this date from 1980s to 2000s so over a 3 decade period. Fair chance, probably 70%, this coin was also illustrated in one of the monthly Numismatic Circular sales lists in this period. It would take many hours to check however so that's a task to do perhaps when in New York at the ANS library. Spink had no digital references in this period so no way to check futher other than brute force leafing through several hundred Numismatic Circulars
Thanks for a very informative response. Highly appreciated! I will continue my search - still optimistic!
I have one old Spink tag and envelope, for my Postumius Albinus denarius, that I was able at least to narrow down a little bit in terms of the date: The tags have to be from before 2000, because that's when Spink moved from King St. to Southampton Row in Bloomsbury. See https://www.antiquestradegazette.com/news/2000/spink-to-join-the-bloomsbury-set/. I think they might be from before 1974, because the only catalog citation is to Sydenham (S. 745), with no citation to Crawford -- which was published in 1974 and almost immediately replaced Sydenham as the most authoritative reference book for Roman Republican coins. I haven't a clue as to what "Series 35" might mean.
The tag shows the mint corrected from Rome to Lugdunum. This could be a simple error correction or was the idea of the globe on the point of the bust new during this period? Who originated this mint ID?
In BMC I of 1923, Harold Mattingly argued at length for the attribution of Nero's globe bronzes to Lugdunum, and regarded that conclusion as proven. I think the idea has been generally accepted ever since. Important arguments: according to Strabo, Lugdunum struck gold and silver coins for Augustus and Tiberius. The common ROM ET AVG sestertii and middle bronzes of Augustus and Tiberius as Caesar can also be attributed to Lugdunum, where the altar of Rome and Augustus was located. Finally there is a clear difference in find spots between Nero's globe bronzes and those without globe. To quote MacDowall in his Western Coinages of Nero, 1979, p. 17: "Finds of Neronian sestertii, dupondii and asses in Britain, Upper and Lower Germany, Belgica, Lugdunensis and Raetia are almost all of the globe type; finds from Narbonensis are predominantly of the globe type; finds from Spain, Noricum, Pannonia and the area east of the Rhine and north of the Danube are divided between the globe and non-globe type; and finds from Italy are almost all of of the non-globe type."
So far I have found 10 issues of Spink Numismatic Circular (SNC) for free PDF-download at yumpu.com, but they are all from 2005-2010, and no hit. Anyone else with suggestions how to get hold of more issues?
Thanks for this interesting addition to the discussion. I found the information about the find spots fascinating, indicating the direction of the coin's "journeys" from minting location to final resting place.
