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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Andrew McCabe, post: 3598728, member: 90666&quot;]This is important and happens many times. I understand however Sincona is actually formed from the coin division of UBS, it wasn&#039;t a separate company that &quot;took over&quot; UBS coins, but was the part of UBS which traded collectible and bullion coins and that was separated (&quot;hived off&quot;) from UBS and thus became Sincona. Many supposedly defunct auction houses aren&#039;t that at all. The business continues and often with the same staff and the same offices but no longer under the larger brand because it wasn&#039;t adding brand value and but did add administrative hassle. Sotheby&#039;s = Morton and Eden now. Glendining&#039;s = Dix Noonan Webb now. Both are at or adjacent to the same locations in Mayfair that they were based at when they were Sotheby&#039;s and Glendining&#039;s, and there was staff continuity. Gemini = Harlan J. Berk and so on. Separating out the coin business not only simplifies things at corporate level but may also help to limit liabilities if there&#039;s an issue with export controls or fakes. It also allows the separated coin firm to have different terms of sale. Some firms get out of ancients but continue with moderns because it requires totally different expertise. The venerable London firm of Seaby is now CNG, except in London where in 2019 staff still answer the phone with &quot;Seaby&quot;.</p><p><br /></p><p>Going way back in history the same happened. Otto Helbing was a large German Jewish run coin auction house whose activities were taken over by Karl Kress in the late 1930s. Only in 1944 did he change the name to &quot;Karl Kress&quot; but he continued the numbering which went from Helbing 85 to Kress 86. For a long time his auctions also have &quot;formerly Otto Helbing&quot; on the cover. Good luck in searching for Kress auctions 1 to 85!</p><p><br /></p><p>As for Tkalec and such like, many small houses are run by one lead and an admin person. People retire. It isn&#039;t that the &quot;auction house&quot; is defunct but more that it was never a &quot;house&quot; to begin with rather it was a sole-trader type of business with never any plans for continuity after retirement and perhaps even run from home (their home was the &quot;house&quot;).</p><p><br /></p><p>Elsewhere on CoinTalk in the last week someone was asking about John Jencek and lamenting his absence from the NY show. Guess what? He retired to Czechia and doesn&#039;t do coin retail any more. His book library went off to Stanford University in California in 2015 - it already incorporated the Frank Kovacs library by that point and Kovacs is another &quot;auction house&quot; that retired though one still seems him around NYINC. I do understand that Jencek is still involved in wholesale numismatics but anyone who disposes of his books isn&#039;t planning to resume retail. Probably off on a yacht on a Czech lake right now.</p><p><br /></p><p>Cases of a large company with significant staff (an &quot;auction house&quot;) really shutting down are rare, and the Freeman and Sear and NFA examples are exceptions that reinforce the general rule: in both those cases it was malfeasance that caused them to stop: they didn&#039;t put down the shutters voluntarily. No-one except a retiring sole trader just stops a business that is a going concern.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]962751[/ATTACH]</p><p>M.AVF RVS is a very rare type in any condition. Well done.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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