I bought two Krause World Paper Money catalogs just so I'd have some idea of the worth of any world currency that came my way. How realistic are their catalog prices?
The catalog prices range from 10% or less to 1000% or more of recent sale value. Realized auction prices are the only true measure of value (although ebay prices are meaningless unless there have been a significant number of very recent sales).
Krause prices should only be used as a guide -- and a very loose one at that. George Cuhaj is really the only person at Krause that works on these catalogs. It is a huge job for one person. He relies upon input from several collectors and dealers around the world to try to track prices. Given the publishing cycles of the catalogues it is not possible to update every country for every new edition. This means that the information in certain sections may be 3-4 years old. If an area heats up or cools off that may not be reflected for 2 or 3 editions. A good example of this are British India notes. They took off in prices about 3-4 years ago. The most recent catalog has higher prices for some issues but not all those that increased substantially. And some of those that were increased are still low in the catalogue. The Indian market appears to have cooled off a little recently since the higher prices brought out more material and the supply is catching up with demand. Keeping a general catalog current in pricing under circumstances like that is next to impossible. If you are going to collect a certain country or countries, you are better off getting a catalog produced in that country even if it is not in a language you can read. You should be able to figure them out including the pricing. Could you imagine trying to collect US small size notes using only the Krause catalogs? Of course not.
Thanks for the input. It's pretty much as I expected. Sort of like the Red Book is to coins except maybe even worse.
Agree completely, though keep in mind as well that the local catalogs are often printed even less frequently than SCWPM. So while they are specialty catalogs, often with every nuance of signatures and dates for each banknote, you can easily find that the last or only printing is ten years old. And then pricing is accordingly off as well. Fundamentally I think most folks use auction results as mentioned for estimating pricing on relatively expensive notes, and SCWPM or other catalogs for pricing low end material. Dave
