In another thread, Just Carl asked about an 1879 Indian Cent by way of asking if (all) dealers are smart. Carl himself also allowed that he never sells his collecteds, and intends never to sell them. There are collectors like him. Generally, though, the lines that separate dealers from collectors from others are not bright and sharp. It might be said that a dealer is a numismatist with a very fluid collection. Likewise, a collector is a dealer with a stable inventory. We all buy and sell -- admitting that this easy generalization is challenged by collectors like Just Carl who never sell. Generally, dealers are numismatists. They have to be. Occasionally, you meet one for whom coins are just something else and next week they will be at a used car auction. Luther Billis from Michener's South Pacific comes to mind. Calling himself a student of the human condition, it is he who organizes the native trading concessions in boars tusks out and yellow dies in. More popularly, think of Sgt. O'Roarke of F-Troop. That dealer does not need to know coins and notes because he knows people, what they will pay, what they will sell for. And that is perfectly valid, as well. Just Carl's trading partner might have been a Luther Billis who did not recognize the doubling at all for anything (die chatter; Longacre; whatever) but thought that the coin was less worthy for being "shadowed" in the lettering. It makes no difference. The sale happens when the buyer and seller agree on price. Period. Last week on the E-Sylum list, I wrote about the late Bob Matthews, a pharmacist and numismatist. He told me that he made the downpayment on his pharmacy selling for $11,000 a coin he bought from another dealer for $1100. That dealer made a profit, too, of course, or so we assume. Numismatics is not alone in rewarding knowledge. Really, all trading is the exchange of information, if you think about. Every buyer thinks he knows more than every seller and vice versa. Money is speech (see my essay here) and the sale of money is not just bartering, but dialogue. Personally, I am at once a collector and a dealer. I collect knowledge, repackage it, and resell it. The coins and notes per se have lesser attraction. I sell the coins and stuff that I accumulate at a market loss to recoup the costs of sales of features that I write. But that's my business, and none of yours. If you like the price of the object, then we exchange information, if not, then not. Q. David Bowers is the paradigm dealer, collector, researcher and writer. He is not alone. When you consider what David Feigenbaum (DLRC Press), J. T. Stanton, Myron Xenos and the many others who publish, you find people who first bought what they liked, then sold what other people liked. In that sense, all sales is service. Our common culture never developed closely along the lines described by Benjamin Franklin in The Way to Wealth. That essay was quoted at length by Max Weber in his work on Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic. (Oddly enough, perhaps, in America, it was the Catholic immigrants who perhaps best expressed that ethic of working hard, saving, deferring pleasure, and serving others for profit.) So, we do not in school (or family) study and discuss the ways of the marketplace. Dierdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtue stands out when it should be commonplace. Even in numismatics, the hobby that buys and sells money in an unregulated agora, we do not always understand our own commercial culture.
Michael (if I may be so informal) I like you a lot. I don't know that we agree on everything...I'll need more time to digest what you've written here, and the essay you linked. (Though, at the surface, the concept fascinates me) Regardless, however, I think I sure would like to sit down over a beer or a cup of coffee with you. Let me know if your travels ever take you to Nashville...first one's on me. Thanks for some much needed enlightenment today.
Great post! I only want to deal with dealers who at their core love coins. At times, you come across dealers who have little passion for their trade and simply seem to look to make a quick buck. Life's too short to deal with such folks. Although I am a collector, I do sell coins at times to upgrade or change directions. As Doug has said, you find out a lot more about a coin when you sell it than when you buy it (or something along those lines).
