NGC to slab ancient coins starting next year
stonej
note.boy
"stonej" <sto...@mail.lib.msu.edu> wrote in message
news:68a66163-0003-4ae0...@d32g2000yqe.googlegroups.com...
> http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=5657
An extra hot place in hell awaits them. Billy
Frank Provasek
few have an eye for what genuine ancient coins look like, that the
lack of confidence keeps these from finding a market, at least among
American collectors.
----
Frank Provasek Rare Coins
http://www.frankcoins.com Ebay FRANKCOINS
Member ANA, Texas Numismatic Assoc, Texas Coin Dealers Assoc,
PCGS, NGC, & ANACS authorized dealer, Texas Auctioneer Lic 11259
Mike Marotta
> http://www.numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=...
I have to agree with Billy and not with Frank.
I have no problem with the slabbing per se. Let the service be
offered. I have sent ancients to David Sear and to the ANA for
authentication. For instance, like all collectors of ancients I have a
couple of worthless museum pieces. I say "worthless" because the
objective prices are low compared to US coins. (That is true across
the board. Most of us have Bank of Canada tokens, which if they were
US coins of the same grade and population would be five-figures, not
two.) But the coins are also objectively rare. So I wanted the best
attributions I could get against the Sylloges and other references.
That is why I agree with Billy. For my ancients in 2x2s, I add
information as I discover it. Books, articles, add to the facts that
attribute a coin. I have worked in labs and weighed these to four
places and had them measured by the ANA for specific gravity to
ascertain their metal content (gold-silver ratio for electrum). You
do not get that with a Slab. They put "Roman Coin Nero 54-68 AD" on
it and there it is. You never get to the facts behind the coins.
When I spoke in the problems involving fakes and the financing of
terrorist organizations, I point to a Celator article warning about
fakes salted into cheap bulk lots of Roman ants. However, for all the
fakes among ancient coins, American coins are just as bad. You can
find on the PCGS Website an archived article about the 1916-D Mercury
Dime called "264,000 Struck... Half a Million in Collections."
Slabbing does little for that problem until and unless you are the
buyer -- and with those 1916-D Mercury Dimes no one knows or cares who
the Secretary of the Treasury was or any other related fact that ties
the coin to history. Again, with ancient, we do care about the
history.
David Sear does provide nice, half-size or full-size laminated
histories for your coins. But you still get to touch them.
When I bought my Owl, the dealer warned me not to drop it, of course,
but he said not to hesitate to hold it, to come to understand it as a
tactile object. "After 2500 years in the ground," he said, "you're
not going to do much to it."
But you specifically cannot touch a US coin. Therein is the
disconnect.
Mike M.
Michael E. Marotta
Bruce Remick
"note.boy" <note...@naespamntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:D0kVk.112561$mr4....@newsfe19.ams2...
Although I don't collect ancients, it will be interesting to see NGC's
efforts to apply the 1-70 grading system to them.
Reid Goldsborough
> Although I don't collect ancients, it will be interesting to see NGC's
> efforts to apply the 1-70 grading system to them.
No 1-70. They'll be giving each coin three grades -- an adjectival
grade for wear, a 1-5 grade for both strike and surface (corrosion).
They'll also be indicating when a coin is of superior style.
The main problem with slabs, as I see it, is that it makes investors
more comfortable with buying coins as commodities, which increases
demand and prices. ICG and ANACS have very little market presence with
ancients. If NCG, with David Vagi behind this effort, succeeds and
slabs gain presence in the ancients market, prices will rise (even
further) for higher quality and rarer coins. On the other hand, fewer
fakes and tooled coins will fall between the cracks and into
collections as authentic, original coins, which currently happens at
every level of the market.
The tactile aspect is a to each is own. Some people like handling the
bare metal of an object 20 centuries old. Other just want to look at
it.
1787
Amen. Slabs are great for some modern coins. Entombing an ancient (or
medieval) coin in plastic is an obscenity.
W.
Mike Marotta
wrote:
> The main problem
> more comfortable with buying coins as commodities, which increases ...
> ... demand and prices. ... market, prices will rise ...
There are two different ideas at work there. One is that US Coins are
expensive or others are cheap simply because most Americans buy
American coins. Again, the Bank of Canada penny and half penny tokens
are truly medallets, richly designed, high-pressure strikings with
great detail and low mintages -- and they are dirt cheap compared to
US Large Cents of the same era. So, yes, those numismatists who
collect beauty and rarity prefer to enjoy lower prices ... until it
comes time to sell... then we all want a bull market.
You would know better than I, but did not Jonathan Kern have NGC slab
a couple hundred Julio-Claudians for his American coins clients?
I am not away of runaway pricing in Julio-Claudians, except as Nero
and Tiberius and the family are all hot items at any time.
There is another point.
(Comment follows)
Mike M.
Mike Marotta
> grade for wear, a 1-5 grade for both strike and surface (corrosion).
> They'll also be indicating when a coin is of superior style.
Where did that come from? The NGC website said only this:
Comprehensive details will be reported on NGC’s Web site in the coming
weeks, including terms and conditions, submission procedures and fees.
Under this new program, coins will be fully attributed and graded
using a system developed especially for NGC Ancients.
http://www.ngccoin.com/news/viewarticle.aspx?IDArticle=1130
The point that I was going to make is that "superior style" is a
misnomer, like "extra fine" for "extremely fine." There is no such
thing as "superior style." STYLE is a technical term from
aesthetics. You can have archaic style, or geometric style,
Hellenistic or Neo-modern or whatever, but "superior" is not a style.
We all know that some work is better than others. You and I have gone
around on whether and to what extent certain die cutters created
"cartoonish" images of Alexander (or as you say, "Herakles"). Auction
catalogs will report coins "of fine style" and again, this may be
common, but it is still wrong.
Note that the press releases refered to "Byzantine" coins, even though
that, too, is a misnomer.
I just see a lot of "de-grading" in this.
Mike M.
Jim Higgins
Count me as a "touchy feely". I want to actually hold a denarius in my
hot little hand for a direct link to an Empire of long ago. Almost a
spiritual thing.
--
Civis Romanus Sum
note.boy
"Bruce Remick" <rem...@cox.net> wrote in message
news:xgnVk.7036$ya5....@newsfe19.iad...
Interesting is a bit of an understatement. :-) Impossible would be more
accurate.
The only auction house in the UK that sells coins slabbed by the sole
slabbing company in the UK is the auction house that founded the slabbing
company.
Billy
note.boy
"Mike Marotta" <mer...@torchlake.com> wrote in message
news:ebbe83de-e691-4fcd...@j32g2000yqn.googlegroups.com...
Mike M.
Spink will often describe an ancient coin as being of "fine style",
"striking portrait" but of course it makes no difference to the grade of the
coin, how can it? Billy
note.boy
Buying an ancient coin from a well established dealer is risk free slabbing
is not required.
Those responsible for this slabbing abomination should be pelted with
tomatoes and eggs at the next coin show, I wish I lived closer. Billy
"Frank Provasek" <fr...@frankcoins.com> wrote in message
news:224eac82-e02d-40a4...@v38g2000yqb.googlegroups.com...
note.boy
I'm off now to fondle my tet. Billy
Reid Goldsborough
> You would know better than I, but did not Jonathan Kern have NGC slab
> a couple hundred Julio-Claudians for his American coins clients?
He's one of the very few ancients dealers (he sells U.S. and world
coins as well) who sells ancient coins in slabs, mostly ICG if I
remember correctly, though he may have used NGC as well. His intention
is to appeal to collectors of U.S. coins who view ancient coins as
risky, same as the intention of the new NGC ancients service.
Mike Marotta
wrote:
> This came from the horse's mouth, David Vagi, who's heading up "NGC
> Ancients." He posted this somewhere and he phoned me as well. I
OK, I figured as much, as you work this way. He posted it on Numis-L
or another list you subscribe to. You called him at work. He called
you back. Fine.
On the matter of "style" and what a "Byzantine" is, here, too, you
fail to cite your sources.
Reid Goldsborough
> OK, I figured as much, as you work this way. He posted it on Numis-L
> or another list you subscribe to. You called him at work. He called
> you back. Fine.
That's not what I said. He called me, initiating the contact. Not that
it matters much. Actually, he asked someone for my phone number, that
person emailed me asking whether it was OK to give it to him, I said
sure, he phoned, I wasn't in my office, he left a message, I phoned
back. Good conversation. I still don't like ancients in slabs or the
main effect they'll likely have on the market if they become
widespread but it's a free world, market economy and all that. Vagi
agreed that they'll raise prices but feels that weeding out more fakes
and altered coins will be a positive countering that.
> On the matter of "style" and what a "Byzantine" is, here, too, you
> fail to cite your sources.
Wayne Sayles has written about style in the Celator. Agree with him
here. He supports the name Romaioin instead of Byzantine. Disagree
with him here. Lots of other sources but I'm not writing a
dissertation here.
Oh, OK. Hieronymus Wolf wrote a book titled Corpus Historiae
Byzantinae, which mainly was a collection of ancient sources on
Byzantine history, in 1557. He actually is probably not the source of
the term. "Bezant" is mentioned in the 12th century. You can look it
up.
The Byzantines may have called themselves Romans, but their world was
far different from what the Roman world was. German rulers during the
Middle Ages called themselves Romans too even though their Holy Roman
Empire was also anything but Roman. The Byzantine Empire was closer in
substance and style to Czarist Russia than it was to the Roman Empire.