Auction Catalogs and Ethics

I don't think the current incarnation of Leu has anything to do with the old Bank Leu or Leu Numismatik. I think they just took the name. If it's the same company, it wouldn't make sense to restart the catalog numbers at 1 again.

Barry Murphy

 

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Actually CNG has digitized most of their printed sales that aren't accessible via their website and they can be found at issuu.com/cngcoins. They were kind enough to have OCR done on them as well, as opposed to simply scanning them in, so it is possible to search each one individually as you browse it or using Google, you can search them en masse for Pescennius Niger by using a query of the following format:

site:issuu.com/cngcoins pescennius

I frequently use it to search for coins by Crawford number as well, for instance the following search brings up a few examples of the corn-ear semuncia from Sicily:

site:issuu.com/cngcoins "crawford 42/5"

The OCR is imperfect and occasionally a punctuation mark will get interpreted as a letter or spaces will be inserted or deleted making searches miss results but overall it works well for the kind of research I've used it for.

 

The LEU catalog is pretty sweet. I was surprised to find on waiting for me.

 

They're doing FINE with their very-generous commissions. If you see them pawning stuff on Craigslist, then you can start to worry about their cost structure.

I'm into U.S. coins and I love some of the stuff in the catalogs: great color pics, fascinating commentary on the coins in general or past purchase history.

And who's to say you won't move up in weight class in the future when buying ? Spread the word to other potential coin collectors about the auction house and their products, I'm sure the'll be thrilled.

 

Heh,

I was wondering why I hadn’t been receiving these hard-cover catalogs, after having done some biz with Leu a couple of separate times.

Just checked my profile and saw that I had the ‘Do not send me printed materials’ box checked on my preferences.

*Clicked* that one off.

I don’t feel guilty at all. I like pretty pictures.