Auction Catalogs and Ethics

So despite having collected ancient coins for over 15 years, in many ways I am quite inexperienced when it comes to more sophisticated aspects of the hobby. As I have noted before, only now am I getting into the world of international auctions, and this next query will reveal the depth of my naïveté.

For the past several months I have been registering with various auction houses. I have bid a handful of times and have even won a coin or two.

Each time I register, I am given the choice between receiving print or electronic catalogs. I thought it might be nice to have a few print catalogs around, so mostly I have opted for the print catalog. Last week I received a very nice paperback catalog from H.D. Rauch. I think one can learn a lot about coins just from leafing through the catalogs.

Today, however, I was shocked to find at my doorstep a very nice hardbound catalog from Leu Numismatik. It's over 200 pages with many photographs, some in color. It must have cost a fortune to send out. In my naïveté, I never thought auction houses send out catalogs like this free of charge.

And now I actually feel a little guilty. Truth be told, I am a small market collector. I will probably never bid on the high-dollar coins in these catalogs. I suspect that in the next few weeks I will go and change some of those print options to electronic options. It doesn't feel right to cost businesses this kind of expense when I know I probably will not patronize those businesses, at least not at the level that would justify these kinds of deluxe catalogs.

Am I being hyperscrupulous here? Am I embarrassing myself? Should I just accept that these deluxe catalogues are simply part of the well-heeled world of coin collecting at the next level?

 

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I may be alone here, but I thinking sending out a catalogue like this one is a very clever move. The auction world is full of people selling to the same audience so there needs to be a way to stand out from the crowd. I also think that the catalogue is warranted because of 2 collections featured in the sale. One collection is that of the director of the auction house himself. What better way to get attention to the collection than to issue a catalogue like this? I also think that some people will be impressed by the catalogue to the point where some might say to themselves "Wouldn't it be nice a own a coin from this catalogue?" I must admit to being a member of this group. I loved the catalogue, it is indeed most impressive. As I paged through the offerings I made mental notes (and then sticky notes) as to the coins I would be interested in bidding on. To my surprise I had tagged more than 40 items! Recently I have been trying to find the auction catalogues for some of my coins. to me it is part of the provenance. The fact that I already have the catalogue may in fact be influencing my decision to bid on a number of the offerings.

I do not think the auction house is doing you a favour by sending you this catalogue. I truly believe that it is good marketing.

The catalogue is sitting beside me as I type. Hmmm...maybe just one more look?

 

If the auction houses lost money making the catalogs and sending them to you, they wouldn't do it. There's no reason to fret about receiving them. I can tell you as a dealer, that the big-ticket sales make the budget coins possible. No dealer could ever stay in business selling $10 coins unless he was also selling $1000 coins, at a decent profit of course. The same holds true for amenities such as catalogs. The auction houses are easily making enough money from the big-ticket spenders so that the collectors of lesser means can enjoy catalogs and coins in their budgets.

 

Think of Clio buying 20 aureus for $100,000 each...

Bank Leu has been around 262 years, I would not worry about them.

 

Don't worry about it. Canceling your catalogs won't cause the auction houses to lower their fees. If you like them and they are willing to keep sending them just keep enjoying them. They have their costs down on those anyway from doing them so long in bulk, they look much more expensive than they really are

 

The last dying gasps of a bygone era. I say this as a dealer who has seen it all. Yes, I prefer the 'old days' to what we have now. These catalogues wont be here 5-10 years from now. They will all be gone. Hold on to them, you can likely sell them!

 

Interesting.
I love ethical questions.
I see your point.

It seems to me that even if a buyer purchased $10,000 worth of coins every year or twice a year, it wouldn't put much of a dent in the cost of producing that catalog when you consider the photographer's time, the assistants, the editing, paper quality we see used in that book, the printing of it, and so forth.

I bet that book is only part of the company's well-planned marketing budget designed to bring down their bottom line in a major way so they can have fine things like that and pay less taxes, too. Maybe that business is one of a group owned by the same person(s) that is designed not to generate a great profit at all. There may be some strategy there.

Also, while it looks like an absolutely scrumptious book and I would love to pour over it, it may be that the electronic version allows one to open the image larger and see more detail than is possible in the printed version.

A way to know the answer would be to contact them by email and just ask them what they prefer and if they mind. And if they don't mind, please post here because I would love to have a book like that to look at on days when I am not able to use electronic equipment but want to enjoy looking at coins.

Thanks for the question. I'd like to see what others think.

edited to say: I thought it was much thicker. It looks to be, what - 50 pages at most? I thought it was super-thick. So I'll change my estimate of costing a small fortune to produce to probably not a small fortune at all to produce.
Can you give us a page count, please?

 

Bank Leu employee 1: What the heck is going on? We just got 50 more printed catalog subscriptions in one night.

Bank Leu employee 2: Maybe it has to do with that new fangled internet thing the young folks are always blabbering about.

Bank Leu employee 1: Don't worry, we will still be here when the internet has been forgotten, ha ha ha!

 

LoL!!

 

It seems to me that the catalogs are simply a very elegant form of advertising. The whole point of advertising is to try and convince people who are interested but didn't previously plan on buying something to buy it (or bid in this case). That seems to describe you in regard to these auctions so I think you can rest easy that you are still a thoroughly ethical coiner

That catalog is super cool but I think I would prefer the electronic version. Picture heavy books just seem more convenient on a iPad or e-reader. Text books it's just the opposite IMO.

 

Leu Numismatik is operated by three young savvy guys. One has spent time understudying and working for one of the most experienced numismatists in the business, and another is part of the team responsible for a resource many of us use - acsearch. I'm pretty sure they know what they're doing. I suspect those on the mailing list who give them little or no business will eventually be taken off it as a matter of course, so don't worry about it and enjoy the catalogs while they're happy sending them to you .

 

It seems the most ethical thing to do would be to take out a loan so you can buy some coins.

 

I simply love auction catalogues! If I had the means, time, and patience I would collect them as a separate hobby. Hold on to them and get as many as you can. They are beauty and education in book form.

NB: Nomos AG has some really fine catalogues, register with them.

 

This - true!

 

Times have changed in publishing. A few years ago you had to decide how many catalogs you needed to expose potential buyers to the coins for sale knowing full well that you did not get bids from people who did not get catalogs. Now, many bids will come from people who never touch paper but bid online. They print catalogs for old collectors who still want them but I suspect many books get filed away to keep them in good shape for resale. You can tell a lot more about the coin from the online photos. The cost of taking the images is much lower now since they had to shoot the coins for the online version anyway. Print on demand publishing allows runs of fewer copies than we did previously. I do suspect that fifty years from now it will be easier to find copies of catalogs from the 1990's than from 2017.

In January I bought two lots from the AK collection having seen the coins online. I was surprised to win them. CNG may have been shocked since they cost about as much as my total spent with them in 20 years. I asked if I could get a copy of the AK 'add on' catalog but they said they had given them all out. I wonder how many they print these days.

As far as getting the catalogs: Keep them and enjoy them. Give them to someone or sell them if they bore you. Between 1997 and 2003 a combination of my purchases and my being known from my website (a bigger deal then when there was little online compared to now) produced a lot of nice catalogs in my mailbox. When I retired to fixed income poverty and cut waaaay back on buying AND stopped updating the site, catalogs tapered off at various rates. For the record, the last to give up on me was Stacks. CNG was one of the first to go. By the time I started buying coins again, everything was digital. I see old catalogs going for $3-10 for ordinary ones and huge sums for some really special ones. Which will appreciate faster: the latest CNG catalog or the coins in it? $1000 might buy a hundred nice glossy catalogs that would take about 8 feet of shelf space. The information in them would probably do you more good than a set of all the Sear/Seaby/Sayles books (whatever adds up to the same price). Enjoy the catalogs.

 

224 pages featuring 420 lots. A beautiful coffee table book that makes you wonder why you should spend money on museum catalogues.

Volume-wise it is nothing against Kricheldorf´s last Catalogue of 416 pages with 2106 lots of the Prof. Dr. Kurt Wiemers Collection.

The printed catalogues by Numismatica Ars Classica are also really nice! They sent me ten so far even though I never ordered one or bid on any of their coins



If I ever sell the highlights of my collection, I will surely offer them to NAC or Leu first because I would want them to receive such a loving presentation, even though my very best coins will still be at the lower end of their fare.

 

Don't feel guilty! Lots of companies do this. They know you're not the Purchasing Executive for Harlan Berk. Hi-end printing companies (I used to be in the business) often send out lots of expensive catalogs as a promotional strategy.

 

As owner of about ten feet of shelved catalogs and a dozen boxes in the attic of ones that I did not find room for downstairs, I can answer that one. Finding the coin you are seeking is really hard when you have to look in all those books. At least museum catalogs have all the similar things grouped in some order. However the new and best answer is online accessible by search engines. Try to find all the denarii of Pescennius Niger in 106 CNG catalogs and you are up for many hours work. Go to CNG's website and go to the Research page. Type in Pescennius and get almost 200 hits (a few are ringers like the Parthian Vologases V who supported him but you can deal with that).
Elapsed time is about the same as looking in one catalog. I regret CNG never digitised their catalogs from the last century but in a few decades, those will be less missed because of all the new sales.

 

@zumbly hit the nail on the head. These are printed advertisements. Most dealers have mechanisms for determining who their active bidders are, and most cut inactives from their mailing list of print catalogues. You should feel no guilt, and enjoy the free catalogues while they last. The production values of the Leu catalogue are among the highest I've seen in recent years: cloth cover; dust jacket; integral ribbon bookmark; high quality paper - who does all that these days??