As stated earlier, 2021 did not see many additions to my Early Dated collection. At auction, I was successful only 25% of the time. Some new coins, some upgrades. All of the pieces in Pt.2 were struck in Germany. Forum member, @messydesk, took the pictures. He created them at this years ANA. He did an excellent job!! I highly recommend him! Questions, comments are always welcome. Only part of the date is showing. Per Robert Levinson's book, there are less than 20 available to collectors. Nice complete date and the rest of the coin is in nice shape as well. Bid on two of these from the same auction. Won both. This is the nicer of the two. Nice clear date , which to me is very important. Less than 20 available to collectors. Relatively nice coin. Most of these while listed as rare, don't show up very often at sale or auction. I finally won this variety after several tries. This is a partial dated coin. The "99"s are at 11 o'clock. This is the last German pieces for my wins this year. Tomorrow the others from Austria, the Netherlands and one from Italy.
I have a question - with some of these coins having only 20 examples available, do you often find yourself up against the same opponents when trying to capture these?
@hotwheelsearl I am up against several groups. Collectors who collect by city, state or region. Other competition is from museums, whether by city or state. Collectors who are adding pieces to a collection that is several generations old. There are collectors who collect rulers or Saints or animals. Coats of Arms are popular. Collecting counter marks is also popular. There are collectors who collect a coin for each year. Coins with dates pre 1501 A.D., whether Roman numerals or modern numbers are scarce and sometimes just rare. To my knowledge there are fewer than 10 collectors here in the U.S. that collect the way I do, using Bob Levinson's book " The Early Dated Coins of Europe 1234-1500". I followed an auction a couple of years ago where I was bidding on a particular coin. My max bid that I sent to the auction house was 15x the estimate. The coin opened at 23x estimate and sold for 32x. This happens quite often. I'm not sure which collector/museum I lost to. To answer your question, I'm not sure who I'm bidding against, but they were much more aggressive than I. I'm at the point with my collection that I don't get to add new pieces very often. With over 300 different pieces in my collection it's getting tough. In Bob's book there are 1200 pieces listed. Of the 900+ that I don't have, most are in museums or are known by only 2 or 3 pieces. There maybe a 100 or so of the 900+ that might be considered "common" but they rarely have come up for sale/auction in the last 20 years. Thanks for asking, if you have any other questions please ask.
