Pandemic Proofs and Patinas

These are my Covid Coins, my inbox tray back to lockdown day 1.

 

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Although, not as elegant as @Andrew McCabe's tray, these are my Covid Coins awaiting a trip to the safe deposit box once the bank fully reopens.

 

This is also great. Love the traditional paper envelopes and red boxes. Really love the specialism the envelopes talk about. You had great success. As with you, the only coins at home are my Covids. Not been near a vault in months.

 

Can you show the Reverse of the 2nd coin or is it the same image?

 

ah! I must have turned that over twice.

ex Sternberg XVII (9 May 1986) lot 458 (CHF 650)

 

Some fantastic coins Andrew McCabe, I especially love your Julius Caesar Dupondius a very hard coin to get in as good condition as yours.

 

Oh how fortunate I am, that my collection is of such quality and quantity that I have my coins around all the time A bank employee would laugh at me...

Very nice collection tray of course! Dont you have any coins around, not even a few favorites?

 

I don't know about where you live but around here we would be required to skip every other square in the tray in the name of social distancing.

My coins are also in paper but I have a code on the back flap that allows me to reorder the coins properly even if I dumped them out on a table. I place my coins' accession number on the lower left front in ink and the two letter + four digit sort number on the back flap. When time comes for them to be inserted into the main boxes. The sort number is in pencil just in case it needs to be changed because I erred in assigning the numbers and bought ten coins between 0000 and 0010, for example. In my photo 2779 is meaningless except that it places that coin after 2778 and before 2780 in my Provincials 'pseudo-autonymous and other' box 'PZ'. Note that I also glue cardboard separators in making each 9" box into three 3" boxes which keeps unfilled boxes from shifting so much. This makes it easier to flip through a box and find the coin as wanted.

 

It is ex Apostolo Zeno collection

Actually it has a repaired hole in it and is somewhat smoothed. But the repair was done before 1700 which is about when Zeno would have bought the coin. So its part of the coins ancient history

 

Nope except inbox items as shown and outbox items that are the result of occasional weeding, and study coins typically very low value bronzes that I've bought to examine due to overstrikes or potential unrecorded varieties etc. I do not keep coins at home especially not favourite coins

 

I like that you have a numbering system even tho I don't really understand it. I have a system too. Every coin has a five digit Crawford number eg 463-02 followed by a two digit year and two digit index number (coin number 09 in 2020 for example) and a two digit weight number. So my Zeno dupondius would be 476-01-20-09-13 or sumtin like that

 

Those of you who only collect one small part of ancient coins have the option of following a book order (in this case, Crawford) but we collectors of everything have no single book that lists even half of our civilizations so we have to make up something. Once, years ago, I keyed on a different book for each major group primarily using Sear for Roman, Greek and 'Greek Imperials' but I could not tolerate the way he split Parthians, for example, so I divided the history of coinage 'my way' dividing Greek into ten pieces G0 (Western) through G9 (Hellenistic) and reserving all P0 through PZ for Provincials and R0 (Aes Grave) through RZ (Byzantine). I did keep things simpler by making the Px series cover the same periods as the Rx series even though that meant some groups were empty sets (RV worked out to be Constantine I but there are no Provincials that late so there are no PV coded coins). If I had it to do over, I would split up Hellenistic using letters above 9. Ancient coins not Greek or Roman used OA through OZ but everything medieval and modern went in the Zx sets. The idea here is you could customize it as you wanted so a simple sort would organize the coins as you wish. The numbers 0000 through 9999 were available within each group for use as seemed best. In the beginning, I just took all my coins of, for example, the 12 Caesars and spread them in date order across RB0000 to RB9999 as seemed appropriate at the time. The only important thing was that all the Nero coins got higher numbers than the Claudius and lower numbers than the Otho so any standard sorting algorithm would place the coins in the desired order reserving enough spaces for the unlikely possibility that I would start specializing in Otho. I had to renumber a few groups because I bought too many coins, for example, FEL TEMP REPARATIO, and had not left enough spaces for yet another coin from the Rome mint. It really has not been all that many times and groups but it is hard to guess where a collection of 300 coins will go when it becomes a collection of 3000.

No one needs to understand a system but the person who uses it. If I were to have your collection, I would follow the Crawford number with something like a Banti number to keep all the same coins with different die numbers or minor devices ordered as I wanted them. That would, of course require doing something else for all those periods not in Banti. My numbers do not record date of purchase etc. but my database records that in separate fields.

I wish I were smart and organized enough to figure out one system that would make sense to everyone and organize the history of coinage from protos to proofs but I fall back on the fact that my way works for me and that is all that matters.

 

Seems like we were doing the same sort of thing, perhaps about the same time.

I was already fixed on Mitchiner's Ancient and Classical world (1978) for Parthian - but I remember being (very) disappointed by the way Sear's 1982 Greek Imperial vol arranged coins by ruler instead of city/state.............

 

There will never be agreement on how to treat Provincials. For that matter, there will never be agreement on whether you post Provincials along with Imperials of the same ruler or in a separate Provincial section. What do we do with semi/quasi-autonomous listed as from the 'time' of Gordian? Do they go with their city, with Gordian or in a separate autonomous section at the end of either main group? Frank Robinson still uses Greek cities by alphabet ignoring location but even the standard location method has problems with cities that share a border between provinces and lists cities inside a province alphabetically. This is not just an ancient problem. Bristol, Virginia, and Bristol, Tennessee, share the Main street with one side in one state and the other side in the other. Recently, Tennessee allowed restaurants to reopen while Virginia told their closed restaurants to watch their competitors serving across the street.

Of all the things I might disagree with in 'standard' references, the one I hate most was Sear's decision to separate out Archaic coins in an alphabetical listing but to lump Classical and later all together in the main body. History so, so rarely blows a whistle and says, "OK, people, we are medieval now."

 

Very nice, Andrew! I got a couple of your coins at the weekend that went in the other direction - from the last Roma auction - anchor semis, also ex-RBW collection, and a nice denarius of Pinarius Natta, ex-Student and Mentor.

ATB,
Aidan.

 

Very nice! I took stock of my own purchases and realized I have bought far more books than coins:

and even after I took this I realized I missed one (and another book is currently in transit). I have bought a few coins - but only two have arrived. Of the rest, one has been stuck in NY for 2 weeks now, and 5 I ordered last week but haven’t been shipped yet. Here are my arrivals (of which I need to take better pictures):

 

Great provenances! Very nice coins too. I upgraded the anchor semis to the coin pictured below.

 

Very nice, Andrew! - is that a 50/4 anchor?

The reason I ask is that I now have a couple of anchor semis and have decided that the one I got recently is 194/2 (as it was sold as) and the other is 50/4, though it was also sold as a 194/2.

There's a little triangular structure on the deck in the 194/2. Or what is the difference? I see that your upgrade doesn't have the triangular structure, but has the little ring at both ends of the anchor.

I have this one - it came from Naville and was in Vecchi 3. The anchor isn't well shown, but I suppose that's what it is. It weighs 17.19g. This was described as Cr. 194/2, but I've now relabelled it (only online) as 50/4.



The other one, ex your collection has a "Cr. 50/4 (?)" note on the envelope (RBW's), crossed out and "194/2" added. It weighs 10.76g.




Is the triangular thing a way of distinguishing between the types?

Thanks,
Aidan.

 

I've sold more coins than I've bought since the lockdown began but this is my current intray now that my final outstanding purchase has arrived.




As far as provenances: middle left ex RBW(NAC 63, 553), ex Vico June 1992, 401. Middle right ex RBW(via later CNG sale), ex Antiqua 1997. Bottom left ex JD Coll, ex Finarte, 1975 and in Banti. Bottom middle ex SC Coll & ex Knobloch, pictured in the Stack's 1978 sale.

I still need to take better individual pics of some of these coins next time I get a good cloudy day.

 

Deck structure but also style which you just gotta see in a lot of examples, for example the thinner and grumpier face in 194. Top is Cr.50 bottom Cr.194. For the latter, 50? was evidently in RBWs handwriting and 194 in mine as a correction