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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;jamesicus, post: 2768434, member: 14873&quot;]Please excuse some rambling here -- offered with a warning that my memory is not too good these days and so dates etc. may occasionally not be reliable. Anyway, my recollection is that ancient coin collecting forty or so years ago was a great deal different than it is to today -- no computers, cell phones, the internet or elaborate auctions meant that most acquisitions (at least for me) were at small &quot;mom and pop&quot; coin shops; department stores (many of them had coin departments in the 1950s and 60s -- I used to buy many of my coins at Joske&#039;s of Texas in San Antonio in 1951); small local coin shows (lots of trading with fellow collectors there) and via &quot;snail mail&quot; from a few well known dealers (printed list mailers). My remembrances are of generally warm and friendly interactions with dealers and collectors back then -- but of course that is &quot;old fogey&quot; nostalgia at work -- there are many warm and friendly (and equally knowledgeable) dealers and collectors today -- exemplified by members of this Forum! And then, as now, a great deal of trust between all. Why all this? Well, I just had to set the mood for myself to post the following:</p><p><br /></p><p>I have owned the great majority of my coins for a great number of years -- some over fifty years -- and I have weighed, attributed (mostly using RIC and BMC) and photographed (some not very well) all of them. So I have a good amount of (sometimes not very well written and organized) research information relating to them -- and a vast collection of photographic images (many archived). It is now time to forego all the &quot;blather&quot; and finally address the aureus I posted in the spirit of my above ramblings! I think I bought it from a fellow collector about forty years ago for around $600 -- I cannot find my original information relating to the purchase. Worn Julio-Claudian aurei could be had for just a few hundred dollars in those days. I used to buy quite a few coins from Ed Waddell via his mailing lists back then and I recall him once phoning me to say he was going to mail me a Nero aureus -- I believe he wanted something like $300 -- and if I liked it to mail him a check, otherwise mail it back to him . Ah, those were the days!! Anyway, I bought it. I could only find a pic of the obverse in my archives (I swapped for it many years ago) -- I think the reverse image became corrupted when I transferred it to my computer:</p><p><br /></p><p><img src="http://jp29.org/ric37.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" />[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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