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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 4532526, member: 110350&quot;]A while ago, in going through a box of old magazines, etc. that I&#039;ve been transporting from residence to residence for a number of decades, I came across the very first mail-order coin list that was ever sent to me, at my parents&#039; address when I was a senior in high school.&nbsp; It&#039;s the November-December 1971 list from a place called Manfra, Tordella &amp; Brookes in Rockefeller Center that was very well-known once upon a time, as much for foreign exchange and foreign currencies as for numismatics.&nbsp; I vaguely remember going to their store at least once, and must have put my name down to be on their mailing list.</p><p><br /></p><p>It&#039;s too bad that I was mainly interested in British coins back then, because I doubt that I looked closely at their ancient coin section.&nbsp; It&#039;s not as if I had a lot of money to spend at the time, but given the prices, I certainly could have picked up a decent number of Roman coins over the course of a few months.</p><p><br /></p><p>A couple of things I notice: almost all the coins are described as F or VF; very few as EF or better.&nbsp; (I&#039;m sure that they weren&#039;t targeting top-of-the-market customers -- they weren&#039;t Stack&#039;s, to mention one place that sold and auctioned high-end coins back then in New York -- but they weren&#039;t Gimbels, either.&nbsp; I suspect that an equivalent place today would describe its coins much more generously.) In addition, I see that despite a few references to BMC and RIC, almost all the catalog references are to Cohen.&nbsp; Even in 1971, it must have been seen as more accessible to people, at least in the USA, than BMC or RIC.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here are copies of the first page of the catalog, and the 5-page ancient coin section (which was all Roman, including some Roman Provincial; no Greek coins at all).</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1122550[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1122551[/ATTACH]</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1122552[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1122553[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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