Age old advice. 1. If you don't know your coins, then know your dealer. 2. Buy the book before you buy the coin. (At least borrow the book from your library.) Never go to eBay. There are trusted dealers on eBay, but they are reputable FIRST and then just happen to have eBay sales. You have to know the dealers. You cannot trust eBay ratings. VCOINS does a good job of vetting dealers. You can find there the dealers who are known from The Celator. THE CELATOR. The Celator is the number one magazine for ancients. Check the Library catalogs at the ANS and ANA. Reputable dealers are often recognized scholars. Look for the dealer websites. The best dealers do more than sell coins: their sites have authorative articles. That said, many who know ancient history and who love the artifacts participate in the hobby as dealers qua dealers, rather than as writers and researchers. Again, you have to learn who they are. That is part of the process. Point 3: "There is no royal road." The story is that when the young king Ptolemy was being tutored in geometry by Euclid, he complained that this was hard. Euclid said that there is no royal road, i.e., no easy highway, to geometry. So, too, with ancients. Membeship in a Society. If you just want one ancient coin, then, really, any ANA member dealer can sell you just one ancient coin. ANA member dealers adhere to a Code of Ethics. So, that is some protection. (For an ANA member dealer, ignorance is no excuse. Two complaints are enough to cost a dealer their membership.) Beside the ANA, there is the ANS of course, as well as PNG (the Professional Numismatists Guild) and the IAPN (International Association of Professional Numismatists). Membership in such societies is an indication of well-deserved and hard-won esteem.
That's wise advice, thanks mmarotta to reminding everybody such simple but necessary things to know before buying, rather than after having been ripped off. I'll just add that as a newbie, good deals on fleabay are an illusion : They are good deal, but for the seller only most likely Q
Great post! I have had problems with ebay and non-vcoin dealers (even with great preputations or 100% positive feedback and that were highly recomended) There are graet dealers there to though, but yeah, ebay is not a good place to to start if your new to ancients
All politics is local. I started this thread in response to the posts by Goldstone. An active collector of US, he wants "just one" ancient to add to his collection. But ancients are not certified for authenticity. So, how do you find a reputable dealer? I am not an active collector. I gave it up almost ten years ago after just under a decade as an acquirer, but this is my experience. Think globally. Act locally. Most of my ancients came from mail order purchases. The first of those was recommended locally. I took a sales list to my local dealer. He had only a few stray ancients himself, but he knew the dealer because he traveled. So, I bought. "It's not personal, Michael. It's just business." -- The Godfather. As it so happens, I have some experience writing feature articles for business and computer magazines. I am comfortable interviewing people on the phone and listening. I wrote for price lists, compared and contrasted, and then called the dealer. My experience as a technical writer taught me the importance of admitting ignorance. (When you are 30 years old and you meet someone who has 30 years of experience on the shop floor, you learn your place in the world.) "I"m new to this. What is special about ..." I learned which dealers spoke of ancient history, because without history, the coin is just a melted rock. Finally, I made a point of learning the ancient dealers in my area. The Michigan State Numismatic Society has two semi-annual conventions. Central States also meets here. The ANA came through a few times (Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati). If you want to get cheated, you have to try a little harder face-to-face with your neighbors than you do with eBay.
Community is where you find it. CoinTalk is a community, as well. This thread is about ancients, of course, but beyond that, I would have no problem with trust when it came to visible members of the CoinTalk community. GDJSMP, Charmy, Mesa, of course, but among the general collectors, as well, who are are frequent posters. You get to know someone one, understand them over time, one post after another. That is why message boards in general are important to the hobby: they build communities.
