Coins

DURING an otherwise routine probabe valuation in a village near Saffron Walden, John Foster from Stansted Mountfitchet auctioneers Sworders discovered a box of coins tucked away in the back of a cupboard. On closer inspection he found an album of East Anglian banknotes which had probably been collected in the 1950s and 1960s for only a few pounds.

NEWS has come in of the theft of a New Zealand ‘Waitangi’ crown. This one should prove to be particularly easy to identify because it is the rare proof – not the ‘ordinary’ issue. 

THE London coin auction is indeed evolving. We have the announcement by Stephen Fenton of the birth of St James’s Auctions. Their first sale is scheduled for Wednesday October 13 at the De Vere Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street. It seems that this promises to be a very prestigious sale.

THE energy with which Spink pursue their business was made manifest on July 15 when they crammed in another sale which has not been part of their auction schedule in recent years. The total take was £250,850 and, although it was a 519-lot general sale, it offered several homogeneous sections. In all, it taught us really quite a lot about the state of the London coin market.

ON July 14 there was a sale at Bonhams (incorporating Glendinings). The return of this appellation to their catalogues will please the sentimental because there is still world-wide affection for the Glendining name.

ANY sale overseen by Alain Weil has the potential to be interesting. His sale at the Hôtel Bergère, Paris, on June 18 was no exception. The items on offer in this 455-lot sale ranged from classical times to the distinctive medals of the Art Deco.

THE Paris firm of Bourgey was founded in Paris in 1895. Now under the direction of the granddaughter of the founder, Sabine Bourgey, it is still going strong if the recent sale on June 3 is anything to go by.

THERE was scarcely a facet of numismatic endeavour which was not represented in Baldwin’s (15% buyer’s premium) sale of May 4 and 5 (2018 lots).

MAY is traditionally when the Swiss wheel out their most spectacular sales of Classical coins. This year’s offering (981 lots) came on May 10-11 at Leu (Zurich).

MORTON and Eden continue to make great strides considering how short a time they have existed. On April 22 they held their first sale abroad – in Milan in collaboration with Sotheby’s. Indeed, that firm is descended from the now closed Sotheby’s coin department.

IN this busy spring season – the busiest for some years – Spink’s have been batting hard. March 31 saw a fine sale which netted £626,750. But, not content with that, they fielded another 632-lot sale a fortnight later, on April 15. Again this sale referred mainly to British and related coins. However, the first 131 lots were devoted to the ancient world.

DIX Noonan Webb’s March 17 sale offered exactly 1700 lots, making for a very long day. But just about every branch of numismatic endeavour was catered for. So comprehensive was this sale that only a flavour of the dispersal can be covered here.

THIS spring season Spink’s have had some hard-hitting sales and it has to be said that the market for the best British material has become very buoyant over the last year or so.

THE British Numismatic Trade Association have just issued a notice to their members about a new European Union import tax. As from March 1 an ad valorem duty has been imposed on any United States Mint modern products imported into the European Union under the following codes – 71189000 and 71181010.

THE Paris expert Alain Weill makes a habit of holding sales which are rather more interesting than those of many of his colleagues. For sure they have a strong Gallic slant, but then sales in London are strongly biased towards the British series.

THE new money-laundering laws appear inadvertently to have created a problem for the coin trade.

THE massive catalogue of Küncker of Osnabrück (27.22/23 buyer’s premium) devoted to Classical, Byzantine and Islamic coins has fallen onto my desk.

THERE was quite a lot of frenzied activity at Bonhams (aka Glendinings) in the days running up to their sale on February 24.

“COINS transmit the image of a ruler far more widely than any other medium available before photography.” Thus the blurb trumpeting the exhibition in the British Museum of portraits on coins.

A new record for a European coin was set in New York on January 15 at a sale held jointly by Baldwin (London), Markov (N.Y.) and M&M Numismatics (Washington DC). The subject of this excitement was a Russian silver rouble.  Boldly estimated at $500,000, after spirited bidding it reached $525,000 (£308,823), selling to a Japanese dealer on behalf of a client.