Kraljeblog

Thoughts on Three Great Collections

2012-11-09T10:57:00.000-05:00

Since ANA 2012, a fair share of my time has been spent pursuing what used to be my full time job: cataloguing. As the hired-gun early Americana cataloguing specialist at StacksBowers, I get to see the cream of the crop, writing about highlights without the drudgery of endless boxes of more pedestrian coins. As such, my contributions have typically been limited to a handful of coins. The Baltimore auction this month is a special one though, the biggest colonial coin event since the end of the Ford sales in my estimation. Held in conjunction with the C4 Convention, the auction contains a number of important consigments, including the Vermont coppers collection of C4 denizen Dan Friedus and the circulating counterfeit Spanish colonial coin cabinet of longtime C4 member/dealer Dave Wnuck. My principal contribution to the sale was the cataloguing of three great collections: the type set of Jack Royse, part I of the legendary collection of Ted Craige, and the Fugio copper collection of my late friend and Fugio scholar Rob Retz.

The Craige, Royse, and Retz collections are so different in size, scope, and effort, but all three are unquestionably great collections. Pondering what makes them great led to an article I penned for CoinWeek.com called "The Five Aspects That Make Collections Great Or, How to Build the Next Great Collection."
Give it a read. How does your collection stack up?

If you need help bidding in the sale, I'm uniquely positioned to offer bidding representation. Drop me an email at jk@jkamericana.com for help. Maybe some of what you buy in this sale will help make your collection great too.
See me in Baltimore at Table 357. My feelings will be hurt if you don't come by to say hi.

Great Jumping Jehoshaphat, a 2012 Kraljeblog!

2012-03-19T00:14:00.001-04:00

So it’s been kind of a long time since the last installment of the Kraljeblog. By kind of a long time, I mean a half dozen countries have endured a regime change, a new country has been born, and Charlie Sheen is no longer crazy. This edition of the Kraljeblog should bring us up to date to the upcoming Whitman Baltimore Expo and the busy spring run of conventions to come.

There have been four major shows since the last Kraljeblog. Given the short attention span of modern Americans and the image-intense nature of the Internet, I’ll summarize them pictorially.

While two-thirds of those polled enjoyed the September 2011 Philadelphia Whitman show, one third thought it was a real snoozer. That one third included most of the dealers and a majority of the collectors in attendance.

As successful as the Fall Baltimore show always is, collectors are always sad to see its stay in town end.

The C4 show won’t be back in Boston. It’s the end of a great run there, and I’m disappointed to see the last urban coin show north of Philadelphia go the way of Lord Howe in March 1776.

I’d say the Orlando (FUN) show was pretty a-ok.

So that about brings us up to the present, in a manner of speaking.

The present state of the numismatic economy is fine. While I’m sure there is some percentage of buyers who are convinced we’re all headed to depression and hell-in-a-handbasket (in that order, or the opposite), they don’t seem to have too much interest, positive or negative, in numismatic Americana. The last few shows (except Philadelphia, which no one attended) have been consistently active and business online has also been steady, even growing. The coin market is better than 2009 if not as robust as 2007. Collectors are buying what they like, exploring new areas, and maturing in their tastes. The metrics from my website indicate that American historical medals and world coins have been the most popular segments over the last year, though the other stuff I sell is very close behind.

So forget the market. It’s fine. What’s new with me, I’m sure you’re all wondering (or not).

I grew a beard, which has resulted in a lot more “random” TSA checks, including one that resulted in an earnest looking uniformed employee checking a read-out and loud-voicedly announcing to her coworker “SEVEN POINT FIVE,” which made me wonder just how personal a metric they were examining.

I bought a hoard that I’m pretty excited about, something that I can publish academically and maybe even get some mainstream news coverage from. Details to come.

With the help of my handy webmaster, I constructed a silly internet meme that got more hits than Ty Cobb, but without as much expulsion of tobacco juice.

I signed an exclusive contract to offer auction cataloguing services to StacksBowers. This doesn’t mean that I’m closing down my business (I’m not), or going full time at my old job (I’m not) or that I’m working longer hours (I’m not sure that’s possible?), but it does mean that I’ll be cataloguing certain properties for their sales. If you have an auction consignment that you’d like me to catalogue, contact me. StacksBowers is the only place I’ll be doing any cataloguing, as I think they’re the most able to handle sophisticated offerings of numismatic Americana, colonial coins, and the other sorts of things I enjoy writing about. John Kraljevich Americana will continue to operate as before, which is to say like a top wobbling just a bit off plum.

Other recent happenings:

The StacksBowers January Americana sale featured colonial coins from the collection of the late great Steve Tanenbaum, particularly his amazing cabinet of Connecticut coppers and New Jersey coppers. The auction room was crowded with specialists in these two areas, a crowd that any other year would have included Steve. While the prices that incredible rarities brought were surprising, what was more surprising (and more healthy for the future of Connecticut copper collecting) was the number of hands in the air for Rarity-6 and Rarity-7 pieces. There are new players in the field, and many of those took home some of Steve’s most important pieces. Still, lower rarity pieces (Rarity-5 and below) and choice circulated examples of common varieties saw prices that would seemingly tempt newcomers into launching their own Connecticut copper collection. That a common choice VF Connecticut copper sells for perhaps 1/10th of what a common choice VF 1794 large cent would sell for seems like an outrageous bargain.

The other major auction offering of the last several months was that of the John W. Adams Collection of French and Indian War medals sold at FUN by Heritage. I’ve known John for years and catalogued a group of duplicates sold at auction a decade ago, so I was pleased to catalogue the collection when Heritage asked me to this past fall. The catalogue turned out well, I thought, and the descriptions focused as much on the history of the medals as their technical quality or rarity. When I got to the auction room in the middle of a bourse day at FUN, I was a little nervous – Heritage had never presented a major collection of Betts medals before and there weren’t many people in the room. I foresaw either buying every medal at my bid (a financial disaster) or seeing new low prices established for pieces I already had in stock, also a financial disaster in this field where auction prices realized, not Grey Sheets, generally define the marketplace.

I had figured every lot in the sale, of course; Betts medals are something of my bread and butter. A few lots in, it was clear that the absentee bid book was my main competition. The first couple lots hammered to the same absentee bidder. When the fifth lot, a piece of off quality, sold to the same guy, I realized this was not another quality-conscious dealer, or even a collector I knew. The six, seventh, eighth lots all sold to the same number. Ditto the ninth, tenth, and every successive cardinal number. About 15 lots in, dealers on the floor started taking pot shots, bidding common medals to beyond market levels just to test this bidder’s resolve. It remained firm. The last lot sold for about ten times what it should have, a result of other bidders taking their frustration out on it. One guy, one apparently new collector of this material, bought the entire collection, lock, stock, and barrel. Is this good for the Betts medal market? Since the Adams sale represented less than 10% of the Betts series, if this mystery buyer dives in and buys more medals, it’ll be good for everyone. If he is a comet collector, one who shines brightly for a moment but is never heard from again, the sale was just an interesting aberration.

At the show and since, it doesn’t seem to have changed the market, as I’ve had nicer examples of medals represented in the Adams sale that haven’t budged at prices lower than those realized in January. So who knows. There is a mystery buyer with a wonderful collection. Here’s hoping he or she keeps adding to it.

The unique gold Betts-416 medal sold for less than it did in Ford several years ago. This was one medal I wasn’t brave enough to underbid up to market levels. Retail buyers who would have competed got fed up with the non-competitive auction and didn’t even bother bidding. What does the lower price realized mean for the market at large? Not a thing.

After a lifetime of going to auctions, literally decades, I can’t say I’ve ever seen another auction like it (though there was this one sale in Rehoboth Beach , Delaware several years ago that comes close).

So as you may (or may not) have noticed, I’m keeping this website updated religiously. Pretty much every Monday night, my webmaster and I park ourselves, eat take out, and get new images and descriptions uploaded to the site. So if you want to have first dibs, Tuesday is usually the day. Or, if you’re so inclined, email me (jk at jkamericana.com) and I’ll add you to my mailing list – a website isn’t a website until it sends out spam, so I’ve decided to start letting my diehards know when the site has been updated. Call it marketing, call it spam, just let me know that you want in.

Also, if you have want lists, let me know. A lot of stuff never hits the website. I buy it, photograph it, and if I know someone might want it, emailing them with a price is a lot less effort than describing it. If you want such emails, let me know.

Next up for John Kraljevich Americana and the Kraljeblog: the Baltimore Whitman Expo. Table 357 is where I’ll be parked. Another Kraljeblog update on the show, on the auction, and on whatever I forgot to put in this one will be coming up soon.

Oh, and add us on Facebook. I guarantee it’s more interesting than seeing your old college roommate post his kid’s art projects or pictures of the wild boar he shot in Madagascar.

Everything’s Coming Up Rosemont: the ANA Returns to Almostchicago

2011-08-25T17:33:00.002-04:00

As Dan Quayle famously said, it’s wonderful to be back in the great state of Chicago. Well, kind of. We’ve already established that Rosemont, Illinois ain’t exactly Chicago (cf. Kraljeblog April 2011), but it is the same “Chicago” as hosted the greatest-of-them-all, the Centennial Convention of 1991. That convention was kind of a big deal: the first show where I made enough money to pay my way, the first time I convinced my poor mother to drive me to a state that didn’t border Pennsylvania for a coin show, and then the largest ANA bourse ever. This bourse surpassed that one, and John Kraljevich Americana was right in the thick of it.

A lot has happened in the two decades since the colossal ANA of ’91. I started shaving regularly, for instance. Oh, and the USSR fell. And some other stuff. But none of it is apparent in Rosemont, where the convention center looks the same, the hotels are the same, and the selection of food (Steaks? Italian? How about a steak?) has remained pretty static.

The coin market is significantly different now. The Libertas Americana medal that I bought in Rosemont in 1991 is now worth more than ten times what I paid for it, which makes me rather wish I’d kept it instead of selling it to pay rent during college. Gold was worth about $350 in 1991, a far cry from the $1900ish price per ounce that was seen during this year’s version of a Rosemont ANA. The main drama facing collectors of the stuff I sell in 1991 was the then-recent decision made by PCGS to start slabbing colonial coins. Today, that earth-shattering decision doesn’t seem quite so out of left field.

The view from bourse table 424 this year was similar to the last few ANAs. There was lots of collector interest in the items in my case, and occasionally elbows had to be sharpened to get a view of the medals, world coins, and colonials arrayed before me. The level of activity at my table wasn’t too far off from last year’s ANA at Boston (best show ever) or in 2008 at Baltimore (second best show ever), though the show felt a bit different. While both of those shows sported aisles that resembled a punk show mosh pit, if said mosh pit was populated by white guys in their 50s, this show’s aisles were oddly empty. Yes, the bourse was big, and that undoubtedly made the crowds seem sparser, but there wasn’t as much public, or as many new faces, or as much buzz. The underpopulation didn’t seem to affect business a great deal, as sales were brisk and buyers were out … but where were the new people? Or the locals with numismatical baubles to sell?

The week began, like most weeks, on Monday. But ANA weeks typically start on Tuesday, with PNG day that is followed by a Wednesday show opening. Because of the jacked-up ANA-sponsored pre-show (a nonevent, according to those who were there; I was not), PNG day was on … Saturday. So the ANA show opened at 9 AM Tuesday with the usual profundities and ribbon cuttings. If this timing caught me a little off guard, I suspect it probably took other visitors a bit unaware too. So Tuesday was a day of die-hards, the collectors you see at every show, the ones who would snowshoe to Tuktuyaaqtuuq if there was a chance to buy a piece for their collection. Still, sales rang up at a nice little clip, with invoices from the piddly (yes, occasionally you make $4 on a coin) to the impressive, all written up to people who already knew how to spell my last name. I do love dependable customers and old friends (and those hardy folks who are both), and they made Tuesday highly worthwhile.

You know who wasn’t there Tuesday? Pages. The red vest-wearing kidlets are usually all too eager to get you a heart attack on a paper plate or rub some Windex on your cases, then practice their best “please sir, may I have another?” face in hopes of some cash largesse.

A friend informed me that Illinois public schools had gone into session the week prior to the show, so maybe that had something to do with it. As it was, pages ended up being rarer on the bourse than roving gangs of ginger-haired coin groupies. Their rarity led to excited exclamations from hungry dealers when one was spotted, akin to a birdwatcher finally glimpsing an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, but only if said woodpecker could get you a coffee and a sloppy joe.

So by the end of Tuesday, I had cloudy cases, a case of hunger that rivaled that of Napoleon’s troops in Russia, and a stack of invoices, but no newps. Newps! One of my favorite questions at a coin show is “do you buy coins?” Depending on my level of rest and caffeination, my responses could range from “no, we make all our coins fresh every Monday morning” to “my probation officer assures me that’s the only way I should be acquiring them” to, occasionally, “yes, what do you have to sell?” But no one asked on Tuesday. In fact, new purchases were pretty tough to come by the whole show, but I love the things I bought.

The best thing I bought won’t make me the most money, but it certainly has to be one of the better stories from this year’s show. A fellow a little younger than me turned up at my table (itself a rarity) and asked about a Continental dollar he had. “Could it possibly be real?” he asked, informing me that he’d fished it from a junk box for $1. I answered him with another question: how much is it? Gobstopped and kerfluffled, he seemed a little puzzled at the implication I was making: yes, fellow numismatist, you paid face value for a genuine (if low grade) Continental dollar. It was worn down to about Good or so, a very rare grade for the issue. Since Uncs are the most common grade by a long shot, most dealers are uncomfortable authenticating a very worn one; they just don’t turn up often. I’d seen a few and felt comfortable with the coin’s surfaces, sharpness, and edge. If it’s not a cast, and not a struck copy, it pretty much has to be real. Well, his was, and after writing him a four-figure check, the lucky cherrypicker was a little dazed, very happy, and highly appreciative. The party to whom I sold it later in the week was amused by the story and delighted with the coin. Somehow, being able to make that guy’s day made up karmically for completely deflating another collector who had to be told that grandpa’s NE shilling was made sometime after Bonanza went off the air. I can’t make everyone happy, all I can do is tell the truth. Sometimes the truth giveth, sometimes it taketh away.

Speaking of painful truths, here’s another: the food in Rosemont ranks on the pleasure scale with getting massaged with a cheese grater. This town needs a Mexican food truck or a good Vietnamese noodle joint worse than Somalia needs a functional government. Please, please, anything but another $40 steak. Yes it was good, but holy Toledo, did the cow play piano or something? Why so much?

Is it horrible to say that I might have preferred this to yet another USDA prime hunk o' beef?

Dining companions this year included several old friends that I just don’t get a chance to be social with all that often. One was a mainstream US dealer that I’ve known since we were both kids but haven’t had dinner with in literally decades. We met after an article appeared about 15-year-old me in Coinage magazine and he wrote a letter to the editor asking to be put in touch with me, since he was an active collector but didn’t know any YNs. He ended up working for a major auction house, then going out on his own, and for the last 15 years or so he’s been at the forefront of the industry with glossy ads and a beautiful inventory of Federal coins. It was nice to hang out, talk shop like we did when we were teenagers, and geek out over things like obsolete bank notes and colonials. Good times. Later in the week, I dined with a recent graduate of my Summer Seminar class, a retired Congressman who would rather talk about 1792 half dimes than Pakistani nuclear policy but can talk turkey on both, a dealer colleague who was celebrating his mumble-mumbleth birthday, and a group of numismatic literature nerds. At the literature nerd dinner, it dawned on us that I had met two of my four fellow diners 20 years ago this week. In Rosemont.

Ah, it always comes back to Rosemont.

So the ANA, it seems, is planning to fish the Rosemont pond for three consecutive years. Not that I don’t love Rosemont (ok, I don’t love Rosemont), but all cost savings and whatnot aside, I think this is a bad deal for ANA, its dealers, and its collector members. I heard of nothing exciting walking into the show in the hands of the public this year, and I suspect that once the ANA has been in the same market for four out of five years, there will be even less for the dealers to buy from non-collector visitors. The organization will see diminishing marginal returns in new memberships from the show and in new collectors created by mainstream media coverage in the Chicago market. Further, many fewer ANA members will have the chance to make it to the show than if it rotated as it formerly did – the collectors I saw at the show this year were pretty much upper Midwest locals or folks that are going no matter where it is. In Boston, by contrast, I saw collectors that I hadn’t seen in years, lured in by the fact that there was finally a big show in their part of the country. The ANA convention should be about outreach, spreading the gospel to potential new members and new collectors throughout the country. Instead, I fear ANA is just preaching to the choir.

So what were the highlights of the ANA for me?

Best new purchase: a newly discovered specimen of the Thomas Jefferson Inaugural medal, one of maybe 3 or 4 known in white metal and perhaps fewer than 10 total. I bought it the day after I sold a silver example, then sold it the same day. It’s so cool, it’s on Youtube.

Non-commercial highlight of the show: being one of the judges for the YN Best in Show exhibit award, which not only vaults the winner into legendary status, but is accompanied by a full scholarship to the ANA Summer Seminar. The winning exhibit proved that an exhibit doesn’t need to be full of expensive things to be an excellent display, but that careful collecting, good research, and an attention to detail pay off.

Coolest thing sold: I think all the stuff I sell is cool, but a fully manuscript 1787 receipt by Alexander Hamilton when he received “1000 Spanish milled dollars” was particularly nifty.

Worst meal: when you go to the concession stand, order a hot dog, and are told that you get two for the price of one because it’s late in the day, the prudent thing is to throw them both out instead of put them in your mouth. I was not prudent.

Best surprise: the NLG saw fit to give my column in The Numismatist (“Early American Money”) the prize for best column in a large club publication. There are some pretty great columns in the same category, particularly the one Dave Lange pens for The Numismatist and Robert Hoge’s regular feature in the ANS Magazine. So thanks, I’m honored!

Thing that made my mom the proudest: My mom, now retired, was once a dutiful ANA volunteer. She received the Glenn Smedley award for her work over a decade ago. This year, the ANA gave me one. I’m proud to be part of a two Smedley family. I suppose they gave it to me because I’ve been teaching at ANA Summer Seminar since 2000. Don’t tell them – it feels a lot more like fun than work. Shh.

Oddest invoice: Filling up a whole page with Spanish colonial coins, then trading the whole pile for a newly discovered high grade example of a rare Fugio. It felt like being 10 and trading sports cards again, except I think more people will want this Fugio than want my stash of Eric Lindros rookie cards.

Future superstar? Not so much.

Biggest regret: Not getting to walk around the bourse! As busy as I was, and as big as it was, I saw maybe 10% of the tables.

Most easily solved problem: Please ANA, please, just let the professional (Greg Ruby) talk on the loudspeaker. Whoever else muscled in on the microphone was loud, inaudible, and generally not very effective. At several points during the show, I was pretty sure I heard that there was a 6 train coming from 59th Street.

The show was a good one, a commercial success, and a well-run event. I sold more than I bought, which my landlord will be pleased to hear. I met some new clients and got to get to know some old ones better. There was time to visit with friends, do some volunteer work, bid in the auction, and get a lot of work done. And now, dear readers, I may need to catch up on some paperwork and some sleep.

More newps to come soon, so look for them. Or, if you actually read this far but have never bought anything from me, drop me an email and let me know what you may be looking for.

Early American Coppers – Portland, Oregon, May 11-13: The Long Delayed Story of a Short Pacific Jaunt

2011-06-22T19:14:00.001-04:00

They were stinky and bepatched, resplendent in natty hair and safety-pinned denim, detectible by nose a few aisles away.

Eyeing the band suspiciously from the aisle seat, a guy about my age leaned towards his girlfriend, next to me in the center position, and whispered disdainfully, “you know, there is a way to do that stylishly.”

I was leaving the Pacific Northwest, bound for New York. The band was from there, the couple was from here, and they couldn’t have drawn a more effective contrast with pen and ink.

I love both cities, and their contrasting cultures, I have to admit. Loyal readers will remember the good times had during the Thrilla in Tukwila, both numismatically and otherwise, so my return to the upper left corner of the country was rather enthusiastically anticipated. While my typical coin show trip is a seek-and-destroy mission, I took my sweet time in the Northwest, arriving midday Monday for a show that, realistically, didn’t start until Friday. Why not? I’d have plenty of time to see friends, do business, and get some outside time that has been much lacking in this Manhattanite’s diet. There is more to life than coins.

Thus, I flew into Seattle, meeting friends John Dannreuther and Dan Duncan (one of the two proprietors of Pinnacle Rarities who share the same cognomen, though not DNA). Danny gave us the fifty-cent tour of Olympia, Washington’s scenic small town capital and his home since just about the days that Kurt Cobain was being a directionless slacker writing albums there in a crummy downtown apartment. We saw some of the area’s natural wonders, and JD and Dan enjoyed a scenic lunch on the waterfront while I frantically paced outside trying to figure out what to do about the “secret” auction back home that had suddenly become far less secret. Were it not for cell phones, I could have just enjoyed my lunch, but so it goes. (I highly recommend the “seafood martini,” which has more to do with the serving method than the alcoholic content, which is zero. I don’t recommend drinking seafood, incidentally). Business is business.

We saw the Pinnacle Rarities office, anchored by Dan’s wife Katy, the real brains of the operation (don’t tell Dan I said that). Dan and I worked on an offer on a collection of world coins, mostly crowns, that we ended up buying later in the week; that group made up the majority of the newps I brought home from the trip.

The drive to Portland from Olympia was magnificent – we had a rare clear, sunny day, affording us views of Mount Rainier, which looks like a mountain should, and Mount Saint Helens, which used to look like a mountain should but now looks like a guy who just bumped his head really, really hard.

I woke up incredibly early in Portland on Wednesday. Few things will get me out of bed at such an hour, but the promise of a nine mile hike deep into the Oregon wilderness with a gaggle of friends is a powerful impulsion. Thanks to the kind offices of Jerry Bobbe, a shortbus full of EACers and friends headed to Silver Falls State Park, the biggest state park in Oregon and a spot that, by rights, should be as famous as Yosemite or Valley Forge. I could bore my dear readers with endless waterfall pictures, descriptions of awe-inspiring aqueous and arboreal delights, and snort-worthy in-jokes from the EACers and Jenna Van Valen, the daughter of my old Wolfeboro cohort Frank and a favorite non-numismatist numismatic friend (currently in the employ of some guy named Doug Winter). I won’t, aside from some waterfall porn. I’ll just make this suggestion: it’s summer. Go outside. Turn off your computers and put on some comfortable shoes. Go find something like this where you live.

Photo courtesy of Jenna Van Valen

A nine-mile hike makes one more than casually aware of the sinews required to make a calf muscle work, so it is no surprise that the most common noise heard on the bus ride home was groaning. Snoring, despite occasionally punctuative bursts of offense, finished second.

Thursday called for a real breakfast, and in Portland, that means a Reggie.

If one wanted to be efficient, you’d just find a good sealant, inject it, and be done with it. But isn’t it more fun to deliver cruel death via biscuits, fried chicken, gravy, and a fried egg? Pine State Biscuits started as a food cart, now it’s a dynasty.

Ah, food carts. If they’re not my favorite thing about Portland, they’re close. Consider the American dream of owning your own business, founded upon your own talent, hard work, and innovation. Now shove it in a tiny trailer, park it on some corner lot in the city, and hope hungry people find you. Just as Auntie Anne’s started as a stand in my local Pennsylvania Dutch farmer’s market growing up and has taken over the world to the extent that their cloying sweetness interrupted 34.8 million diets in American airports in 2010 (the last year for which good statistics exist), so too have many of Portland’s food-carters become major restaurateurs. But why? When you can get your sandwich at one cart, your coffee from another, and a ridiculous dessert from a third, who needs real restaurants? Luckily, among those I travel with, my Native American name is Areyougoingtofinishthat, so I got to try a bit of everything.

Such caloric inputs require an output, so Thursday afternoon a small traveling band conquered the Columbia River Gorge and its famous vistas and waterfalls. Multnomah Falls is the most famous, but the river is the attraction to me. It was in the Gorge that Clark famously scrawled “Ocian in view! O! The Joy!” He was fined by Strunk and White for overuse of exclamation points, but the sentiment has become the defining soundbite of Lewis and Clark’s gazing upon the Pacific.

The river is wide, green, mountain framed, and seemingly endless. The waterfalls along side are lovely, but they are window-dressing. To gaze upon the Columbia is to see one of the continent’s great river systems, the Fifth Avenue of early American exploration of the area, and one of my lifelong dreams. It was a bit of a melancholy moment, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps I sympathized with those young explorers being so far from home, yet not even halfway through their journey.

Clark: "Are we almost there yet?" Lewis: "Don't make me come back there."

Multnomah Falls, about which Meriwhether Lewis famously remarked "Holy ^%$#, look how tall that %^#@ waterfall is."

Staying out by the Gorge for most of Thursday, my cohorts, including one other dealer with a table, and I made a strategic decision to skip EAC set up. It was a sunny day in Portland, a far rarer event than the chance to make a 10% margin wholesale sale to a guy you can see the next morning, and we made our choice. I have no regrets.

That evening was the true beginning, and the spiritual heart, of the EAC convention: the reception and the happenings. A post-Gorge nap removed me from most of the all-hands-on-deck-for-free-food-while-it-lasts hijinks, but I was pleased to get to see the Happenings. I recall, way back when, the only Happening was the Half Cent Happening, a place where a few varieties of the forgotten “little half sisters” could be explored, judged, compared, and studied. The ranks of half cent collectors being filled with generous sorts, these Happenings generally included some of the best coins in existence, laying on a table and ready to be picked up and examined by anyone who happened by. That aspect hasn’t changed – it’s nice to be able to play with a gem Mint State 1811 that’s still raw in 2011 – but now there are also Large Cent Happenings and Colonial Happenings. The colonial room was more notable for the people than the coins, which is saying something considering how nice the coins were. It’s in these casual, round-table moments, when we’ve all devolved to just friendly inquisitive coin geeks, that EAC really shines and the distinctiveness of its convention becomes most apparent.

The other time is on the bourse, where I arrived at 9 AM sharp the next morning. An EAC bourse is a cocktail party with Allstate cases, it is not a coin show. There is no rush to do business, no quickstep around the bourse in search of cherrypicks, no elbowing to see a box of newps. There are coins. There are friends. There are places to sit to visit with both. My table seemed to be one of the more popular spots for that, and the chairs out front were always occupied with some friend or other, including some I’d not yet met, taking a load off and hanging out. Sales are secondary at an EAC convention, somewhat like the relationship between fishing and catching fish.

So what was discussed at my table? Oh, die varieties of Comitia Americana medals, including the rare 1860s US Mint “Gunmetal die” strikings. The political and romantic career of John C. Fremont. Rarity ratings of Fugio coppers. Bacon. Fine 18th century American furniture. The usual.

Friday night involved me staying up too late reading about Lewis and Clark, so I could do a presentation the next day and make it look like it was coming entirely off the top of my head.

Saturday is the big day at EAC. In my last board meeting as secretary of EAC, my trusty laptop and I joined a room full of EAC’s grizzled leadership at 8 AM with a caffeine deficiency (me) and a powerful thirst for some AC power (my laptop). We had a big agenda to cover, and it took until well after the public hours on the bourse had begun to cover it. I was barely at my table a half hour before it was time to go present my educational presentation.

It was entitled “The Taste of Dog Meat: Lewis and Clark in the Pacific Northwest.” The title was little more than a teaser, though dog meat was discussed (as was the fact that the only dog not consumed by the hungry party was Lewis’ Newfoundland named Seaman.) Lewis and Clark’s voyage falls right in the heart of the early American coppers era – 1803 to 1806 – and thus the history of the expedition is right up the alley up most who attend an EAC convention. Luckily, for illustrative purposes, there are plenty of numismatic collectibles associated with the voyage. We talked about Captain Cook’s Resolution and Adventure medals, and how the first American voyage to the area struck similar medals for native distribution, the 1787 Washington and Columbia medals, engraved by Joseph Callendar of Boston. Thomas Jefferson Indian Peace medals came up for discussion, along with the Washington Seasons medals that Lewis and Clark carried. My comment about the Northwestern natives’ pioneering amusement with white people dancing turned into an unexpected laugh line. Somehow, the fact that several dozen EACers can identify with goofy dancing shouldn’t have surprised me.

The talk ended, decently received and lacking from major gaffes, a powerful hunger developed. I didn’t know that Thai Eggs Benedict over a coconut shrimp cake was what I wanted, but it was I had at a local lunch joint. Writing of it makes has me crave it again, as it was the best meal I had among a crowded list of awesome food in Portland. Maybe, in keeping with the day’s theme, I should have found a poodle instead.

Saturday afternoon was basically the last blast for the EAC Bourse, and it ended not with a bang, but a whimper. Perhaps because I’d seen so many of these folks at PNNA, or perhaps because EAC is the one show with more interesting things happening off the bourse floor than on, but sales were sluggish. Alas, a day at EAC without a sale is better than a good day at some other coin shows. After a few flickers of activity during teardown on Sunday, the business part of the trip was finished.

The trip, however, was not. I was not about to come this far without seeing the site of Lewis and Clark’s winter camp at Fort Clatsop, near the coastal town of Astoria. And, while there, how could I resist the chance to see Cannon Beach, Haystack Rock, and the famed house from Goonies? Off to the coast some friends and I went, amidst classic Northwestern showers, clad in water resistant coats and fortified with coffee and snacks. The coast is beautiful, distinctive, and memorable. Finding the end of Lewis and Clark’s westward push – nearly twenty years after I first saw Charlottesville, Virginia, where Lewis started – was a special moment. Spending hours in the car with three coin dorks and not really talking about coins was also special.

Haystack Rock, left. Wet coin dorks, right.

If you don't recognize this house, you are under 25, over 40, or have been in a secret Chinese prison.

And that is the draw of EAC. While coins are the common denominator with the group, there are few other conventions where the people are such good friends and are so interesting that coins are just a tiny slice of the connection. Based on those expectations, Portland’s EAC was one of the best ever.

I’m already looking forward to next year’s show in Buffalo. Yes, seriously.

The Thrilla in Tukwila

2011-04-13T05:46:00.002-04:00

Beckoned by a request to travel some 6000 miles to deliver a lecture, when I last left my readership, I had not yet reached the halfway point of my lengthy cross-continental journey: Tukwila, Washington, the Rosemont of Seattle, an airport town that offered more rhyming opportunities (and one additional Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier reference) than Fort Mitchell or Grapevine or Queens. After cancellations and a missed connection, spending a night in Phoenix (where the lack of coin shows this weekend may have left me looking for something to do to) seemed a very real possibility. Instead, USAir found room in their hearts to find me a seat on the last flight of the night into Seattle-Tacoma. When I finally found myself in the historic and scenic Northwest, it was well nigh 2 AM.

The shuttle ride to a familiar-seeming hotel I’d never been to was brief, and I found sleep easily in a state that had been crossed off my see-all-fifty list by a simple bridge crossing into Vancouver from Oregon a few years ago. The next day, Friday, would be my first full day in the state of Washington, and I was rather looking forward to it.

I pulled the curtains open expecting to find rain. Or mist. Or something wet and yucky that would make me want to don flannel and rock out to Mother Love Bone or something. Though there were clouds, there was not the predictable precipitant power of the Pacific Northwest present. A good start, I thought.

The Tukwila Community Center, the home building to the Pacific Northwest Numismatic Association’s (PNNA) Spring convention, reminded me a little of the place that hosted the first Coinfest in Greenwich, Connecticut. I swore then that the august John Kraljevich Americana booth would never again be set up beneath basketball hoops, which lent a Christmas bazaar kind of feel to that Connecticut show several years ago. I overlooked the hoops (and the suddenly desire to pull up for a jumper), and got settled in. As it turns out, I had no reason to be concerned. The PNNA staff, a volunteer force of serious numismatists, showed a Whitmanesque level of efficiency and an even greater concern for the comfort of their guests. There was a dealer lounge (a what?), stocked with good hot coffee (for real?), plenty of cold water and soda (for free?), and even a mess of snacks ranging from muffins to M+Ms (no playing?). There was a lunch truck at a nearby entrance serving hot food almost all day, and even a little river (albeit one that spawned the name of a serial killer) behind the center that was a fine place for a head-clearing walk. Parking was free and right out front, and the location was maybe 10 minutes from my hotel and even closer to the interstate. And the bathrooms didn’t have that Apocalypse Now kind of smell that’s familiar in so many other convention centers. I was smitten. If they had a show here every weekend, I might set up. It felt downright comfortable, even friendly.

As I set up, I found friends already present, some of whom had been following my tuches-chafing travel from the day before via Facebook. Kyle Knapp, a fellow ANA Summer Seminar instructor, would be hanging out behind my table while walking the floor and displaying a little selection of nice Conder tokens. Token maven Jerry Bobbe, whose violin is bigger than yours, was also there already, as was Byzantine nerd (and indefatigable ANA volunteer) Larry Gaye. Scott and Lisa Loos, friendly world coin dealers and PNNA activists, were there to see me in, and plenty of other friends stopped by before too much of Friday had passed.

The bourse had been open just a few minutes when a nice group of women came in with positive attitudes and a little box of coins that was, admittedly, mostly junk. The prize in their group was a nice grade Georgius Triumpho copper with a big planchet clip, and a tragic affliction of powdery green corrosion: if the famed dampness of the Pacific Northwest hadn’t manifested skyward at first glimpse, I had now at least witnessed its effects on unprotected and casually cared for copper. Did I also look at paper money, they wondered? I do, and I did, and I was the first professional numismatist type to see two nice Pennsylvania National Bank Notes their family had owned for years. With a word on their value, they got a few new paper money holders and were sent off smiling at their good fortune.

It’s the sign of a well-promoted show when members of the general public come to the show. It’s an omen of good fortune when they come bearing items of value to have examined.

The omen proved true as various items found new owners: the pretty gilt Wyoming Massacre so-called dollar before lunch, the gold medal featured in the last Kraljeblog (thanks, website!), a French liard, a lion dollar, et al. A little core of copper collectors from the area came by, and some colonials said their last goodbye: a 1786 Connecticut Miller 1-A, a 1785 Nova Constellatio, a clipped but attractive Oak Tree shilling, and more.

Feeling good about the show already, it was easy to be friendly to strangers. Stories were told, introductions were made, and smiles were exchanged. One stranger, as it turns out, had bought several nice colonials from the late Washington dealer Bob Everett, a giant of a man as well known for his stature as for the fine eye he used to fill his exhibit cases with beautiful early copper and Bust silver back in the day. Would I maybe like to purchase some, he queried, since his interests had evolved in new directions? Of course: buying nice coins is hard, so such opportunities are gladly accepted. A few minutes later, I had a new Pine Tree shilling to offer, along with a good looking St. Pat’s farthing and a decent Fugio. So far, so good: despite being one of the smallest shows I’ll set up at in 2011, the PNNA show turned out to be decent for both buying and selling.

As I’d never been to Seattle before, Kyle and I decided to venture onto the nearby light rail and head downtown to find someplace memorable to eat that wasn’t in a Tukwila strip mall. We found 94 Stewart, near Pike’s Market, an unprepossessing exterior that yielded to a gourmand’s playground inside. It was hard not to giggle as the specials were declaimed, with offers of free range wheatgrass that had lovingly been stroked and had haiku read to it before being harvested in accordance with modern Buddhist practice and laid down prayerfully on a plate before being consumed. They take their food seriously in Seattle.

Kyle seemed horrified that I might offend my blog readers by including what appetizer we ordered (rabbit, served with a carrot slaw, of course); then again, he’s from LA. We actually eat meat where I come from, and some people even kill it themselves. Oh, the humanity. The bunny wabbit was vewy tasty, and the rest of the meal – including the carefully prepared Seattle coffee – also proved worth the schlep downtown.

Saturday was the big day, since I had been invited to be the convention’s keynote speaker at noon. I woke up early to go over some notes and reading so I felt at least slightly prepared – I dislike working from notes while speaking, so I’d rather just drink from the fire hose of knowledge, then spit some useful facts back out a few hours later. The morning flew by quickly, and some more business was transacted, most notably including the return of the Pine Tree shilling-bearing stranger from the day before. Would I like to purchase some more colonials, including some nice coppers and a Libertas Americana medal? Quicker than I could ask if the Pope wears a funny hat, I had a pile of nice state issues and other popular collector coins in front of me, and agreeable numbers were soon reached. Better yet, when a good customer came by the table and asked “what’s new and nice?” I had stuff to show him. The Pine Tree shilling and the St. Patrick’s farthing, both potential future PCGS submissions and fine examples sure to grace my case at the next show, were offered and sold before they ever saw New York. They’d stay in the Northwest, has they had for at least two decades, and had already been welcomed into another fine collection. Few things could have pleased me more.

My talk was entitled "Before 54’40 Or Fight: Numismatics of the Pacific Northwest." It focused on several rare and interesting medallic issues with a connection to the exploration and history of the region. I got to talk about the Resolution and Adventure Medal of Captain James Cook, an Indian Peace medal of sorts that was distributed to natives of the Pacific Rim from Nootka Sound in modern-day British Columbia to Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia. That medal helped inspired the Boston-made Columbia and Washington medals of 1787, engraved by Joseph Callender of the Boston Mint and distributed mostly in modern-day Oregon. On the second visit of the Columbia Rediviva to the area in 1792, the ship’s captain found a river he named after his vessel: the Columbia River. Lewis and Clark, who arrived in 1805 bearing Jefferson Indian Peace medals, followed the river to its mouth with the charts drawn more than a decade earlier. The explorations, by land and sea, of English and American citizens paved the way for a substantial fur trade, an industry that inspired the 1820 Northwest Company token and the extremely rare ca. 1832 Astor American Fur Company medal. Fur traders also brought Haitian militia buttons, now called Phoenix buttons, to the area for exchange with the Indians, and even today they are found in the earth from Southern California to British Columbia.

The talk seemed to go over well, though the audience was quieter than I might have preferred, and I closed my remarks in under an hour – ideally, it would have been closer to 40 minutes, the real threshold of an adult attention span. Plenty of those in attendance later came by my table to say hello, and a few of them were eagle-eyed enough to notice the Resolution and Adventure medal in my case. While it was my first visit to the extreme northwest corner of the United States, I wouldn’t swear the same could be said of the example of that rarity in my inventory.
More things sold late Saturday, and the bourse remained consistently busy. The very fact that I heard no one complain about the show speaks volumes, especially since coin dealers tend to be a pretty complainy bunch.

Saturday night, Olympia resident Dan Duncan of Pinnacle Rarities came into town, fresh from a family vacation and looking rested. Dan, Kyle and I headed back downtown for more good coffee, good food, and coin talk. No rabbits were harmed in the production of that meal, but it was pretty good all the same. In keeping with my theme of eating members of the Merrie Melodies cast, I had the duck.

And here it is, Sunday. Usually, you wouldn’t find me dead on a bourse floor on the West Coast on Sunday, but my flight was late enough to at least test the waters at PNNA on its final day. I’m glad I did. A few more things sold, most notably including a Standish Barry threepence, a new addition to a collection that focuses on denominations that come in threes. When I get a Willow Tree threepence or a 1737 Higley copper, now I know where to go.

By noon I was pretty much torn down, and my departure from Seattle was far less tumultuous than my arrival. I’m now 36,000 feet over someplace on an Alaska Airlines flight into Newark, 2 feet from the rear lavatory and about 50 feet from two of the stars of TV’s Deadliest Catch, whose first class seats appear more comfortable than the captain’s chairs they occupy on the tube. My flight attendant sounds a little like Sarah Palin.

The next Kraljeblog will go up next week, with a complete review of Augsburger’s and Orosz’s Secret History of the First U.S. Mint, whose pages I finished turning on the trip. Look for some new inventory up soon in a number of categories, and make plans for seeing it live at my next show (Chicago, for Central States) or during my triumphant return to the Northwest for the Portland EAC show less than a month away. For now, I’m going to try in vain to get my ears to pop so I can hear the crying babies more crisply.

A Week Like Muggsy Bogues: the Baltimore Post-Game Report

2011-04-08T01:12:00.000-04:00

36,000 feet, a thousand miles east of Phoenix, April 7, 2011

If this week was a Presidential administration, it would be William Henry Harrison’s. If it was a point guard, it would be Muggsy Bogues. If it was a wheelbase, it would belong to an Isetta. It was too damn short.

Following the nifty Whitman Expo in Baltimore (on that subject, more below), social obligations kept me in the nation’s capital until Monday, and Congressional underfunding of Amtrak and their aging fleet kept me on a track south of Wilmington until we limped into Biden Station, where the train’s contents, like gas under pressure, was released in every direction to try to find another way northbound.

Of course, the world being as small as it is, and public transit being the chosen route of the patriotic among us, I ran into another coin pal on the platform, taking his own sweet-old-time home from Baltimore too.

The last two days blew by with the surprising speed of a Cliff Lee fastball, but I managed to get some new inventory up, including newps from Boston and Baltimore. Cheery subjects like child labor and Indian massacres may now be found among the pages of my inventory; I can only imagine the headscratching this will someday provoke among online researchers into these subjects, when they find themselves on a wind-swept, online dead end full of weird round things for sale.

Then again, who knew a monument to child labor and the pre-nanny state power of the American corporation could be so pretty?

It has been said that those who study history do so out of curiosity about the future. With that in mind … why am I going to Phoenix? Easy answer: because USAir told me to. When the phone rang at 6:20 AM, I assumed my sister (now 11 ½ months pregnant, judging from her Hitchcockian profile) had suddenly ended up with a case of wet feet. Nope. It was pals at Orbitz, relating that my 2 PM flight (yes, eight hours later) had been canceled due to maintenance issues. If TV execs had been as forward looking as the mechanics at USAir, we might never have had to endure Alf.

By 6:30, I was back to bed with a new booking to the PNNA show outside Seattle this weekend, via Phoenix, which is right on the way if you pull both sides of your map until it’s really taut. While the mechanics knew my 2 PM flight wouldn’t go by 6 AM, their epaulet-wearing coworkers who steer these things didn’t know they were supposed to pilot my flight with as much notice. I tend to run late, but I made the gate on time. They arrived at the gate at 5:30 … for a 4:20 flight. So here I am, besides a girl who is tearing so many pages out of her fashion magazines that I can only imagine her apartment is more paper-strewn than my own, wondering if there is a flight to Seattle after the one I’m going to miss and preparing my story for those inquisitors on the bourse tomorrow who will presume my late arrival will have to do with a late night debaucherous celebration of my Phillies swift filleting of the Mets or an accidental meeting with a smoky voiced redhead that left me unhelpfully detained.

Truth is, I’ll probably just end up on the floor of the Phoenix airport until the wee hours, with my legs wrapped around my inventory in a Figure Four that Ric Flair would be proud of. We’ll cover what happens in the next Kraljeblog.

Now, a rewind: what of Baltimore? Everyone else on the planet has already posted their show reports online, breathlessly describing the volcanic commerce that took place in Charm City last week. So here’s my lily-gilding addition to that ink heap.

It began like most shows, with an auction. One auction. Just one. Like Voltron or Wu-Tang Clan, the two firms who once conducted auctions in Baltimore have joined into a powerful unity: Bowers and Merena (the very firm that lured me into this business full time, back in the Clinton administration) and Stack’s (the very firm from whose brain this smaller firm sprung, like Athena from the head of Zeus, if only Athena carried around a briefcase full of old medals and Zeus looked like Larry Stack. Wait, Zeus did look like Larry Stack.) So instead of arriving early for a Stack’s auction at some posh nearby hotel, then heel-cooling until lot viewing opened for B+M, there was but one event. Noted changes: no food, a negative for a numismatic ruminant such as your author; a new venue, squeezed into a third floor room at the Baltimore Convention Center more appropriate for a Saturday meeting of collectors of elongated cents than a major auction; new faces, including the one who asked for my ID when I got a bidder number – sorely tempting me to make a comment along the lines of “don’t you know who I am” or “I was working at this firm when your grandfather was in diapers!,” which, while totally untrue, might have been fun to proclaim.

There was little in the auction for me, so I spent most of the Americana and colonial coin session watching how the proceedings were going. My old team at Stack’s continues to be on-point (and nattily attired, like the fussy New Yorkers they are), and I have every reason to believe the new California types will also acquit themselves nicely. A brief delay at the beginning due to the imposition of technology upon our decidedly old-school profession allowed me to jaw with friends like Joe Levine, the dean of the American medal market, and others, whose names I won’t drop because then they might think I actually like them.

The show started in full swing on Thursday, when dealers and collectors who pretend to be dealers are allowed to set-up and/or bother people who are setting up. Kind of like a family vacation, setup day is both a lot of fun and very stressful – if I could just throw three or four slab boxes full of stuff for sale in a case, garnish it with a feather, and call it Macaroni, it would be a piece of cake. Further, it would give me a chance to go scour the floor in an effort to ~~rip out some eyeballs with amazing cherrypicks~~ find some new inventory. Alas, that ain’t the nature of this beast, and it takes me hours to unwrap raw stuff, find things that I haphazardly tossed in stock boxes while screaming out the door to catch my train, and make it look halfway presentable. In the few hours that such endeavors take, other dealers come by a visit, look, poke, offer me things, ~~get free appraisals on things they’re too lazy to look up themselves~~ ask my opinion on interesting things they’ve acquired, and shoot the numismatical breeze. I like setup days yet loathe them all the same. This one went swimmingly, though, and it was nice to see everyone.

Thursday afternoon brought in the general public for their first viewing. As I’ve related to others not in this business, the general public at coin shows is best divided into two groups: coin enthusiasts and the folks that might be termed the am haaretz (the “people of the earth” in Hebrew, i.e. the locals who heard there was someplace dry that didn’t charge admission). The Thursday crowd is more of the former, the Saturday crowd is definitely more of the latter.

Friday brought more coin weenies out, including lots of familiar faces. Baltimore is close enough to where I grew up that I always see plenty of members of my old coin clubs back in Pennsylvania and a goodly number of other locals that have known me since before my voice broke.

To answer the most commonly asked question: yes, my mom is doing well and she’s enjoying retirement.

On Friday, coins and medals were bought, and coins and medals were sold. It was well attended enough that at one point I had enough winter coats behind my table, left by friends who were in for the day, that I could have opened a Goodwill. Though there were plenty of people there, it wasn’t so slammed that I couldn’t keep up (some Baltimores are like that). A new collector came by with an interest in early American medals, and the modest crowd kept at bay long enough that we could spend a half hour or more talking and visiting, conversing about the medals he was interested in and finding a few items he could take home. There is honestly no greater fun than this at a coin show, with all the joy of teaching combined with the pecuniary promise of selling some items to a new, good home.

That night, Old Bay took a sadistic pleasure in plaguing my chapped lips, made dry by climate and endless conversation. I, in turn, took out my frustrations on a dessert that had never met a man like me before. Footage exists, but will never be made public.

Saturday morning was the same old good Baltimore show as Friday: plenty of people, a good amount of business, and some newbies. By noon, numismatic cognoscenti had given way to the folks who bring in corroded zinc pennies clutched in old hankies that are more valuable than their contents. By two, there were more empty cases than dealers. By four, I could have comfortably lounged in my pajamas behind my table while reading comic books and no one would have cared. Maybe I’ll try that next show.

Most commonly heard exclamation when a non-collector sees the medals in my exhibit case: “look how big they are!” Someday I will catalogue all of the responses that have crossed my mind that social grace will not permit me to deliver to someone with whom I am previously unacquainted.

Highlight: a collection of Lifesaving medals that had been off the market for decades coming my way unexpectedly. The amiable owner of the treasures circled back to my table several times waiting for me to be somewhat less busy than the legendary one-armed wallpaper hanger; boy am I glad he persisted. Some of the medals may be offered on this website, should they not be snapped up with immediacy. One, awarded to a sailor for heroism during the Boxer Rebellion, will be auctioned in an upcoming Bowers and Merena Hong Kong sale, where properties of Chinese cultural interest find a ready clientele.

Another highlight: visiting with both authors of my favorite new book, The Secret History of the US Mint, Len Augsburger and Joel Orosz.

My review will be forthcoming here when every word has been digested, but in a word, it’s awesome. I’ve known both of these gents for a long time, but my previous high esteem of them as writers and humans has been surpassed by their newest work. I also had fun making Len blush, as I described a particularly nicely adulterated Seated half that I sold the day before to a well known dealer for his personal collection. I’ll let Len tell you the story.

The crux of most of the show post-mortems I read tends to be a statement on the health of the market, as encapsulated by a single show. So here’s mine: the market is fine. Are the aisles full of millionaires who liberally reach into fat sacks to satisfy their every numismatic desire? No. People are buying more carefully now than they were a few years ago. There is a little more circumspection that attends a major purchase – and, depending on who you are, major might be $100 or $20,000. (If $20,000 is something less than a major purchase to you, dear reader, I invite you to call me personally so that we might discuss your collecting goals and so you can buy me dinner.) But collectors are collecting. They crave new material, especially nice stuff – the same story in every market since Lewis Roper signed his consignment agreement but for those brief market tops that end as quickly as they start.

My customers who buy expensive things have itchy trigger fingers – they have money and want to spend it on nice things, but nice things are tough to come by. It seems that, in my specialties, collectors are starting to realize the embarrassment of riches they enjoyed in the last decade. The Ford stuff is all dispersed now. There is not a sale on the horizon with duplicates of rare medals, pedigreed colonials, and other tasty morsels. When you find such things, they are one at a time, dislodged by force rather than accident. Is there enough to keep collector interest high? Everyone knows that collectors who find nothing to buy quickly become ex-collectors. I hope I can keep enough of the good stuff in stock to keep y’all interested. I see more collectors, for lack of the stuff they know they want, finding stuff they learn to want: colonial collectors are finding more to like among the West Indian issues of the 18th and early 19th centuries or among 19th century struck copies, Betts medal collectors are discovering the allure of War of 1812 and later Mint medals, and everyone loves the truly unique – indeed, I think I sold every engraved coin I took with me to the show.

The sun has set over middle America, having turned the smoke over our heads an imperial violet. (Anyone who gets the literary reference can take 10% off their next purchase, if you can honestly tell me you knew the answer without Googling it.) My plane continues to trundle, seemingly silently, towards my doomed connection and a desert city that really wants to be LA in the worst way. Seattle and another coin show await. And the Kraljeblogger now rests, with the promise of another report when I catch this bus going the other way.

Boston retired, Baltimore up to bat

2011-03-29T02:40:00.000-04:00

Phillies opening day is this Friday, April 1. My opening day was last Friday, rolling out of a bed in the historic Parker House Hotel (thank you, hotels.com) early and heading to the first public day of the Bay State Coin Show in Boston. By a fluke of internet hotel pricing, the hotel where JFK had his bachelor party and Ho Chi Minh worked in the kitchen happened to be cheaper than just about any place in Boston. The mile walk up Tremont Street was nice even though it was cold, past Boston Common and the Granary Burial Ground, where Paul Revere tends his eternal anvil.

The March Bay State shows are a far cry from the November event, which hosts the annual C4 convention. November tends to be bustling, particularly with the sort of collectors I tend to deal with. The March show is more of a basic regional show, though Boston and environs are home to plenty of collectors of early Americana. Plenty of familiar faces came out. There are a few folks with whom I seem to do a deal, either buying or selling, at just about every Boston show, and it was nice to see them again. Sold: the cased Macomb medal in choice Mint State that I promised to list here. It was the first time I’d ever put it out, and away it went. Bought: a pleasing and affordable George I/II Indian Peace medal, Betts-165. This type of medal was distributed by British agents in Pennsylvania, New York, and nearby environs in the first half of the 18th century, one of my favorite historical places and eras. It will be nice to be able to offer such an historic item for under $1000.

The show was not the busiest one I ever attended, but it was worthwhile and nice to visit with friends. I came home on the train on Sunday, got some work done on the trip, and turned mey attention to the next away game in the new coin show season: Baltimore.

So off I go, attending the Stacks/Bowers auction before the show and setting up in my usual spot at Table 357. Baltimore is dependably one of the best shows of the year, and the last show there, held in November, seems a lifetime ago. I’m sure the folks who attend will be pleased to have a springtime end to their numismatic cabin fever for the last four months.

I’ll be home for just a few days before heading west to the PNNA show in Tukwila, Washington, where I’ll be speaking in the numismatic theatre on “Before 54’40 or Fight: Numismatics of the Pacific Northwest.” Expect to hear about the Columbia and Washington medal, the Northwest Company token, Phoenix buttons, and more if you’ll be near Tukwila.

I have a few Kraljeblog updates that will be coming as spring continues. I’ll have reviews of two books I’m reading at the moment, the new work by Len Augsburger and Joel Orosz on Frank Stewart and the First U.S. Mint, entitled The Secret History of the First U.S. Mint (an addictive page-turner so far) and the ANS-published The Silver Coins of Massachusetts by Christopher J. Salmon, a beautiful book that tackles the difficult questions of how Massachusetts silver was struck and how to make sense of their varieties. I’ve had a request to produce something of a list of important auction catalogues that I use as reference works. The short version: learn to swim well enough that you can make it to the desert island with all 21 volumes of the Ford sales.

I’m also giving some thought to assembling a blog entry, article, or maybe even monograph cataloguing the medallic issues of the Mexican-American War. It’s such a pivotal moment in American history, concomitant with the annexation of Texas, the taking of California, the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, and the signing of the Oregon Treaty. With our relationship with Mexico and its people a constant news item, a re-examination of the most significant armed action on that border seems relevant, to say nothing of the fact that the medals produced by the U.S. Mint in that era, largely the work of C.C. Wright, represent a high water mark of American medallic excellent in the 19th century. It might evolve into a book … but who would read it?

The next Kraljeblog, of course, will also include an update on the Baltimore Whitman show, where hopefully business will be transacted and frolicsome hijinks will ensue. And, most exciting perhaps, newps! I’ve been updating the site religiously every Monday night / Tuesday morning, and I expect to continue that schedule. So Tuesday is a perfect day for you to look for new inventory. Or, if you’re really a nightowl, check about 2 AM Monday night.

On the National Museum of the American Indian

2011-03-23T04:24:00.000-04:00

I’ve always been a museum aficionado. It might be in my blood – my grandfather, a malacologist, was affiliated with the Academy of Natural Science, and my visits to their museum with my mother as a kid to see their dinosaurs and gemstones still loom large in my memory. My first visit to New York, long before I considered moving here, was as a kid of maybe 4 or 5, intent on visiting the American Museum of Natural History. As time went on, I went to a lot of museums, studied museums in hyper-academic mumbo-jumbo in college, and even worked at one, when I was an historical interpreter at Monticello. Since entering the numismatic field full-time, I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of them, occasionally consulting, sometimes just volunteering, but always doing something fun with the bright, interesting people who serve as museum staffers and curators.

This past weekend I got to visit one I’d long looked forward to – the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) on the National Mall in Washington DC. Founded in 1989, the museum didn’t open until 2004, housed in a tip-o-the-hat-to-the-Guggenheim rounded building faced with an unfinished sandstone, evocative of a Western rock formation. It’s four stories tall, wrapped around a massive round performance / gathering space with a 120 foot ceiling. They recommend you go to the top and come down, starting with a film (which I skipped, because I almost always find them tedious).
The displays focused less on objects and more on culture, with all of the interactive and audio/visual tools that define modern museum science. The museum covers all native American cultures, from the Arctic to South America, and plays off the contrasts and remarkable similarities in the culture and worldview of tribes from both extremes. Most of the museum is steeped in the present – if you’re looking for mannequins wearing feather headdresses and moccasins, you won’t find much. But, of course, there are plenty of interesting historical object mixed into the narrative to offer interest to those intrigued more by the 18th century than the 21st.

My favorite individual object was, unsurprisingly, from the American colonial era. Attributed to the Mahicans of Western Massachusetts circa 1750, it’s a really gnarly club – wood with an implanted sword tip, a la tomahawk, in the shape of a sturgeon. The decoration, reminiscent of the engravings on a French and Indian War powder horn, includes an image of an Indian holding a tomahawk.

Killer fish

It’s beautiful, with fine folk engraving and the same gorgeous old patina as the stock of a Brown Bess rifle. It’s whimsical, yet deadly – you could get seriously brained with this thing, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that several did.

My favorite display was the literal wall of guns, suspended in plexiglass, ranging from early flintlocks to semi-automatic rifles. There were plenty of jaw-dropping historical guns, many once the property of famous Indians like Sitting Bull or Chief Joseph. On the same floor, a display on gold was equally staggering when you first round the doorway to see it. Beginning with pre-Colombian gold relics, it tells the history of the precious metal and its affect on the native tribes from Brazil to Sutter’s Mill. There are plenty of numismatic items mixed in – a tumbaga bar (one of my favorite historical items I’ve ever gotten to research and handle) was a surprise to see, considering their obscurity beyond numismatic circles. There were lots of gold coins, nothing remarkable numismatically, but all appropriate to the exhibit – eight escudos, Brazilian 20000 reis, several different denominations from the Fleet of 1715, and more. Several were upside down, but such things are forgivable – let’s be honest, a cob is pretty confusing to look at even for most coin collectors.

The Indian Peace medal display, and the interpretation of its objects, could use some improvement. The museum has some really exceptional medals among its collection, led by a 1795 oval George Washington Indian Peace medal by Joseph Richardson. That medal, which I believe was on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, was simply gorgeous, with the exact kind of impressively artful engraving one would demand of a genuine medal and a bold JR mark on the reverse. I couldn’t capture a good picture of it, and I can’t find an image anywhere on the NMAI or NPG websites, but it was beautiful. The other George Washington oval Indian Peace medal on display, dated 1792, was less convincing.

This is not to say it’s fake – just that its engraving was less refined, it lacked a makers mark, and its rim was not the typical style.

I don’t like to condemn – or really even speak ill of – things I haven’t actually examined in hand. A view with your nose pressed against the case is no substitute for holding something, turning it in your hands, putting a glass on it, and really getting to know its intricacies. That stated, I have very very serious concerns about the large size Jackson in the museum’s display.

The medal itself is very sharp, with only trivial marks that look to be too consistent to be accidental. The surfaces of a large size Jackson medal in high grade are almost always prooflike – they were struck in a reflective finish. This medal is matte and the color is even. It may be a silver coated bronze striking, or it may be some other kind of fake. But I think the chances of it being an authentic awarded Peace medal from Jackson’s administration is slim.

I’ve liked Peace medals a long time, and I’ve seen them in all sorts of settings – tiny country auctions, fresh from an Indian chief’s descendants, 19th century collections, museums, coin shows, etc. In all those years, I’ve never seen a genuine Indian Peace medal on a big fancy hanger. It doesn’t logically follow that any rule so silly could be hard and fast, but it is in my experience – when there are big beads, bear’s teeth, fur, fancy beaded things, “wampum,” or anything similar, the medal is almost always some kind of fake. I don’t know why such things are added to fake medals so often in an attempt to indicate their authenticity, but it’s nearly 100% contraindicative. This Jackson medal comes on such a fancy hanger. I’m not a specialist on Native American objects, so I can’t tell you that it’s not a real something, but I don’t think it belongs with the medal it’s with now.

A gift for Chief Liberace?

The provenance of the Jackson medal also bothers me. It doesn’t make much sense that a Jackson medal would come from the upper Missouri, which did not get a lot of attention from Jackson’s administration. If the medal migrated there over time through trade, one would think it would be more worn. If it came from Wisconsin, or Arkansas, or Indiana, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Montana seems less likely.

But there were some superb medals too. A well worn Madison large size that belonged to a Sac and Fox Chief named … Ulysses Grant.

A Franklin Pierce medium size medal with a provenance to Wisconsin, and what looks to be its original ribbon.

This ribbon is instructive – it looks very similar to the ribbons depicted on most paintings of medal-wearing Indians of the era.

Elsewhere, the museum had a display of Indian images on U.S. coins and currency … that was almost entirely empty, where rows of obsolete and Federal currency that were once on display were replaced by LOAN EXPIRED cards. It’s a pity the museum hadn’t nailed down a loan from the museum across the National Mall to fill some of those holes again. Hopefully they will in time.
The museum was beautiful, the displays were instructive, the layout and approach was innovative, and the flow was mostly intuitive. It’s easy for a specialist (like, say, a coin and medal nerd) to pick on one little aspect. When I was a Monticello tour guide, we used to complain about the people who tried to play “stump the tour guide,” the odd person who liked to ask super-obscure questions about French provincial door hinges to show off just how much they knew about French provincial door hinges. Museum staff have to know enough to talk to experts in an enormous diversity of specialized fields, yet haven’t got the time to become specialists in more than one or two fields in many cases. I plan to reach out to the NMAI to see if I could examine the medals in person at some point and make a better conclusion about their authenticity – and if that happens, I’ll be sure to post the results here.

If you can get to DC, the museum is well worth a visit, and there is something numismatic on nearly every floor. If the displays weren’t enough to lure you, consider this: the cafeteria is literally the finest museum cafeteria I’ve ever been in anywhere in the world.

The beginning of coin show season, and a deal on nice Civil War tokens.

2011-03-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

We have sprung forward, and coin show season is upon us. A lot of folks are in Sacramento this week for the ANA ~~Midwinter Convention~~ ~~Early Spring Convention~~ National Money Show. In the next three weeks, I'll be at shows in Boston, Baltimore, and Seattle, so it's time to dust off winter rust, go through my inventory, get the paperwork square, and head on the road.

In the course of such work, I've come across a lot of great things that will be up on the website soon -- or in my case at any of those shows. Some deals never make it to shows, and here's one of them. I bought a substantial (150+ piece) collection of Civil War Tokens, all politicals. The quality was all over the place, and now it's been sorted -- the average circs are off to a wholesaler (for a price that seems too cheap but it really is where the market is on VG Civil War tokens), and the nice Uncs have been flipped to go get enslabulated, an act that feels a little bit like putting ketchup on a steak.

The sweet spot of the collection were pieces that were apparently in the collector's favorite grade range: nice EF-AU. So I've separated those pieces out to offer here. I won't take pictures of individual pieces, but for every $40 you send me, I'll send you an attributed Civil War political token that grades EF or better with positive eye appeal. The nicest will go out first. If you have a basic request as to type (Indian head, Lovett-style bust, military related, historical figure, etc.), I will try to fill it as best I can.

These six pieces were chosen pretty much at random -- I grabbed a fistful, picked out the first one of the general type I found, and tried to show several different types. I didn't pick for quality though, this is pretty much what they look like.

There's nothing rare here -- most are R1 and R2 and of fairly typical designs. But they're nice and fairly priced. If you want me to cherrypick 5 at $200 or 10 at $400, we can do that too.

Drop me an email at jk@jkamericana.com. I don't have all that many of these and would not be surprised if they all sold quickly. They're the same price as a fairly well circulated common variety Confederate note. Which would you rather have?

The Literature On World Coins Circulating in Early America: An Inquiry

2011-03-01T03:54:00.004-05:00

Like probably most everyone reading this, I get a LOT of email. A sizable percentage of them get the usual Blackberry-on-the-bus perfunctory replies, but occasionally a customer will send an inquiry that requires a bit of thought and a longer response. The Kraljeblog seems like a good place to share some of those answers, at least the ones that may be of a more general interest.
The inquiry I received this morning had to do with books. I like questions about books. An educated customer is our best customer. The collector has an interest in the foreign coins that circulated in early America, from colonial times until the end of foreign coins’ legal status in the United States in 1857, and was curious to know what kind of published literature there was on the subject. Admittedly, there’s not much out there. In fact, it’s a topic that deserves its own book and I’d love to write it someday.

The proportion of foreign coins in circulation in the U.S. was substantial until the Civil War. Luckily, the types are well documented – but the information is scattered throughout a variety of obscure primary sources. The best are U.S. Mint reports and other official publications. Books like 1850’s A Manual of Gold and Silver Coins of All Nations by Eckfeldt and Dubois not only offered insight into what came into the Mint in assays, but summarized the various Congressional acts that described the values of the common coins then found in circulations. The same information can be found in American State Papers, offprinted Mint reports, or other government publications. Adding to the broad strokes Congress took to identify and value foreign coins then in commerce, other contemporary literature – almanacs, magazines, newspapers, even fictions – can complete the picture of coins in circulations.

In modern times, the various post-1793 Mint acts that regulated foreign coins were published with illustrations (and values) of the relevant types as America’s Foreign Coins by Raphael Solomon and Oscar Schilke. Now out of print, the book is useful, though not exactly chock-full of facts. It is easily found among the inventories of numismatic literature dealers.
Unfortunately, the Schilke-Solomon book only covers laws (and types) after the foundation of the U.S. Mint. The wide variety of foreign coins circulating in colonial and Confederation-era America is ably covered in Phillip Mossman’s Money of the American Colonies and Confederation. Issued at a price tag near $100, some phone calls to numismatic booksellers may well reveal a lower price tag. Go buy it. It’s academic, it has graphs and charts, and the footnotes sometimes take up more of the page than the text. It’s brilliant. If I could only take one book to a desert island and still hope to still write columns on colonial coins, I’m not sure I wouldn’t take Mossman instead of Crosby.

Using contemporary references and archaeological information, Mossman paints an accurate picture of the mess of domestic and foreign types in early America. The archaeological evidence is especially important, since the finds of coins here and there in small digs are published one at a time in obscure non-numismatic publications. Rarely do they see numismatic sunlight.
Crosby’s 1875 The Early Coins of America is useful in the same way Schilke-Solomon is, aside from the latter volume's pictures and quaint 60’s-era pricing, which is to say it has the original text of laws that regulate the value of foreign coins in circulation. It’s often a dry read, and the terms used by colonial legislatures were not numismatically precise and require interpretation, but the facts are often best found in those legal papers.

The often-overlooked monograph by Joe Lasser entitled The Coins of Colonial America is a treasure trove, despite its brevity. Illustrated by some of the magnificent pieces he gave Colonial Wiliamsburg, the book shows the wide variety of world trade coins – silver and gold – that found their way to American shores. In an appendix, many of the coins that have been archaeologically recovered at Williamsburg also make an appearance. It’s the textbook Erik Goldstein and I use every summer in our ANA Summer Seminar class.

I collect early American almanacs, and they are unsurpassed as a resource on foreign coins common in early America, their weights, and their values. Almanacs often published a conversion chart of commonly encountered coins, showing their necessary weight, value in various colonials, and more. Much of the information I published in the Edward Roehrs Regulated Gold catalogue came from these primary sources.

If you have the curiosity and time to seek out archaeological site reports from colonial contexts, most sites include at least a few coins among the artifacts. This sort of evidence is useful to show the finer points, often overlooked in literary sources: which exact types were here? What mints? How worn were they at various eras? Also, oddball stuff turns up in dug contexts, and if the same unusual type shows up in multiple contexts, we can start drawing some conclusions. For instance, the tiny 12 sols struck for use in the Isles du Vent (Windward Islands) in 1731 and 1732 by the French have found their way into the soil in Virginia, Maryland, and New Jersey more often than coincidence would suggest – it appears many of these coins came from the West Indies and actively circulated here. In fact, that little known French colonial type is found far more often than the Red Book listed 1767 sou!

Did you know 17th century Swedish silver coins were found in the ground at colonial Jamestown? Yeah, neither did I until I found this on their website.

How about the coppers struck in Santo Domingo starting about 1530? This one was dug up at Jamestown too – one of several that have been unearthed.

There is plenty of information on the foreign coins common in early America out there, scattered willy nilly through common books (Breen’s Encyclopedia has some tidbits, as does the introduction to the Redbook) and the more obscure (I’m a fan of Clarence P. Gould’s 1915 Money and Transportation in Maryland). Kenneth Scott’s books on colonial counterfeiting are also useful. If a counterfeiter was copying a particular foreign coin type, that type was clearly in circulation in his (sometimes her) area, and was probably fairly common to boot.

Several of the ANS’s COAC volumes have included papers that detailed some aspect of foreign coin circulation in America, dating back to 1976’s Studies on Money in Early America, edited by Eric Newman.

Live near a college library? Go digging for some of the academic – but often very useful – papers included on this bibliography from the Leslie Brock Center. Many of the titles cover paper money, but a good number also include specie coinage.

If you want to know more, you’ll just have to sign up for the ANA Summer Seminar class and hear me ramble on about foreign coins for a good two days!

Some more inventory is up, so check out the new listings.

The Rebirth of the Kraljeblog

2011-02-24T22:20:00.003-05:00

In the last year or so, the only place to get snarky commentary and in-jokes mixed with coin show play-by-play and odd bits of original research on early American numismatics has been directly from my mouth (or from CRO’s Road Report). Why let those guys have all the fun, or force people to actually come visit me to get a stream-of-consciousness sampling of the random numismatic-related thoughts that pop into my head? How decidedly 20th century. Thus, it is time to relaunch the Kraljeblog.

In its last manifestation, the Kraljeblog was little more than a format for occasional (I know, I know, very occasional) coin show updates. However, thanks to the blessings (pronounced kɜːs) of social media and Blackberries and whatnot, I can now bore my friends, colleagues, and customers with completely off-the-cuff and ill-considered commentary with enough frequency that even the most insistent reloader will be sated. To go along with such notions of progress (pronounced əˈpɒkəlɪps), John Kraljevich Americana will now have its own Twitter account (God save us all) at @jkamericana and a John Kraljevich Americana Facebook page too.

I have no idea what hashmarks (#) do on Twitter, except I’m pretty sure that if you hit #pistareen in a year, you’re not going to have too many others aside from me popping up.

Unlike my personal page, where you pretty much have to have shared a meal with me or know an incriminating story or two to be accepted as a friend, the John Kraljevich Americana Facebook page is open to everyone – if you dig early American numismatics, history, medallic art, or are just an ex-girlfriend who can’t find me any other way, feel free to join up. I’m told that it’s good marketing. Then again, sometimes bold marketing plans go awry.

So what’s new in the Kraljeblogosphere? Well, a new website, as you can see. My photography skill has now graduated to the approximate mastery level of a 2nd grader; by year’s end , it may even graduate from elementary school. My interests remain the same: selling cool old stuff, focusing on the 18th century, and occasionally making deadbeats who don’t buy anything chortle on the blog even though I don’t owe them a thing. Full disclosure: those of you who know me know I’d probably rather make you chortle than sell you something. That stated, when I call my landlord on the 5th of the month and try to make an extended chortling session pass for rent, it usually doesn’t end well. So I will attempt to weave the commercial and the educational/entertaining together as best I can.

So the Kraljeblog is back. And if something interesting happens between now and my next coin show, I’ll be sure to let you know.