Vespasian As, Good 6 in an ANACS slab...or is it?

Don't you mean David Vagi ?

 

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Yes, sorry! I knew that . . .

 

Every time this comes up I can only show my one and only coin in a slab. I has escaped being cracked out because I consider it more valuable as a sample of why slabs by ignorant slabbers are not worth the plastic consumed in the process. My image shows the coin and label reorganized to fit better. I have not seen such errors on an NGC slab but there is a thread in CT history showing a fake RR denarius in an NGC slab. I do not recall whose it was or if he still posts here.

 

Thank you, Donna, for that valued clarification. I had no idea who was behind NGC. Now I have considerably more respect for them.

 

@dougsmit , do you know when that National Numismatic Certification was done? I have one I eventually removed from an ICG slab but was reluctant to do so because it was an artifact of what I suspected was the first wave of ancients ever slabbed (certainly the first major auction of slabbed ancients). It was for Heritage 296's Dr. Joseph Seventko Collection (New York, 30 July 2002).

(If you read issues of The Celator from 2001-2 you'll see the full page ads as part of a big promotion between Heritage and ICG. Incidentally, I think it may have been disastrous for Seventko, at least on the Tarsos coins, which appeared horribly in the photos and, wherever I could track them, sold for well under half of the prices of their previous and then later auction appearances -- in this case, $287.50 incl. fees in the slab, after selling for ~$620 at Athena Fund and [edit: OOPS, next one is Estimate] $650+fees at CNG XXIX in 1994, eventually even more when it reappeared at CNG in 2019. Heritage soon improved their slabbed photos.)

By de-slabbing it, though, the tradeoff was that I was able to positively ID it as part of another bit of recent ancient coin market history: the Athena Fund sales at Sotheby's in 1993 (part II). Also the 1994 CNG sale that was forgotten by the time of their 2019 listing. (It had bounced around by then, including Calgary Coin to JB (Edmonton, d. 2019), from whose estate it came -- curated, if I'm not mistaken, by @Terence Cheesman .)

I saved the label of course and photographed it thoroughly first (and it made a couple auction appearances slabbed).




Incidentally, I've kept another slabbed because it's an NGC "error slab". NGC was slabbing at least 92 Severus Alexander Denarii from the A.K. Collection group lots from Triton XXI (by any chance, @Al Kowsky , was this one of your consignments?) and they clearly put the wrong label in the slab. (NGC #'s 4682251 – 001 through about 92 were all from the same group lot.)

The very curious thing is that the coin appears with the correct label on the NGC Lookup website! So they must photograph them before actually sealing the slabs

My slab reads NGC 4682251-068, graded XF . When opening that link, it's the correct label, but not my coin. It should actually have this label that appears with it correctly here: NGC Holder 4682251-022, graded AU ("ex AK Collection"). (NGC may be strict about copyright images so I'm not using any of theirs.)

A very interesting coin in it's own right, here's CNG's slabbed photo:



Luckily there was an unslabbed photo in one of the old AK Collection Supplement .pdfs from CNG (though low res):



(Their catalogers missed the provenance to the supplement for this and another, noting only "Reportedly AK Collection (NGC tag)" or similar. It actually mattered here because it now at least gets a "reported" provenance to 1970. I was feeling foolishly generous and gave a contact at CNG the extra info so he could add it to the live auction -- mainly so the archive would reflect the full provenance if I didn't win. I've wised up and stopped doing that until after I drop out of bidding, or, whether I bid or not, to keep them from being permanently lost, I often add extra provenance to coins in comments on ACSearch [mine are by "CONSERVATORI"; @Rich Beale , it might be worth re-enabling comments for ROMA for this reason!].)

 

Curtis, I have never used AK Collection as a provenance or had it printed on a slab because I knew someone else was using it . I have used AWK Collection in the past & will probably use it again in the future. I do have an interesting story to share about the Dr. Joseph Seventko Collection. Shortly after the Seventko collection was auctioned I received a call from a FL dealer who bought several coins from that auction that he thought I might be interested in buying. He sent me photos of the coins & I bought the coin pictured below for $600.00 that came in an ICG slab that was graded MS62. I'm sure the dealer paid no more than $300.00 for the coin. I later cracked the slab & sent the coin to NGC for grading. I had no idea who Dr. Joseph Seventko was & really didn't care, further more I didn't want a potential buyer to trace it back to see what it sold for . I sent the coin to Heritage 4 years ago & it sold for $3,840.00 ! That very same coin was sold by Heritage again last August for $9,600.00 !!! Looks like I should have held onto it a little longer .

 

I don't see a picture.

 

Oh, haha, I wasn't even thinking about your initials -- but in my file of provenance notes for one coin I did actually write "the other AK" next to your name! The Antoninus Pius Alexandria Drachm with Griffin/Nemesis you posted on CT a while ago that was a K&G plate coin and previously in the Morris/Peck, Wetterstrom, and V. Ruzicka Collections. (CNG didn't list you as consignor, I just recognized it from CT.) It also came with the catalog of the Ruzicka Collection, which was great:


I also recalled seeing at least one post on your CNG consignments when googling around for prior provenances, so whenever I've gotten a coin from CNG in an NGC encapsulation I wondered if they were yours. (For example, another Provincial from Phil Peck/Morris, the Severus Alexander Provincial from Lydia, Acrasus. As far as I can tell, it may be the best known example, but I don't know if it's ever been photographed out of the holder. I only crack them out if I have a reason, which in this case would be to get a better photo to send in to RPC. I haven't seen Dane Kurth's GRPC yet, though, so maybe there was already be a better on in there....)


Wow, that is some appreciation in price on the coin from Heritage! That's >32 times pricier the 2nd time around, that's some kind of record for the same dealer selling the same coin twice, I expect! As you say, it raises one of the interesting commercial reasons that provenances are often "lost". Unprovenanced coins aren't necessarily freshly smuggled out of Turkey or something, as some would have us believe, but because the sellers naturally don't want it known what they or someone else paid.

As David Atherton said above, I think your photo failed to attach, but I'd be very curious to see what coin it was!

As far as I can tell, Seventko's collection is notable mainly just for it's association with the start of slabbing ancient coins. I wonder how he felt about it -- the prices looked awful for the Tarsus Staters, and not great for the other stuff.

 

Curtis, The Egyptian drachm & catalog was part of my consignment , the Sev. Alexander bronze wasn't . I wonder if we'll see the Theodosius solidus sell again a few years from now for 20K .