Coin Dealers Sue State Dept. for Details on Import Bans

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

Importing Cypriot coins like this one is now banned.

Three organizations representing coin collectors and dealers have filed a lawsuit against the State Department demanding greater disclosure of how the government makes decisions on the import of ancient artifacts from abroad.

The suit, filed jointly on Thursday by the three groups in Federal District Court in Washington, asserts that the State Department violated the Freedom of Information Act when it failed to release documents that the coin collectors had sought concerning recent decisions in which the State Department either considered or imposed import restrictions on ancient coins. The documents involve trade between the United States and Italy, China and the Republic of Cyprus.

If the coin collectors prevail, the State Department may be compelled to shed more light on the way it makes decisions on protecting the cultural property of other nations, a process that many art dealers, museum directors and collectors argue has been unnecessarily shrouded in secrecy.

The information sought from the State Department includes documents related to a May 2004 request from China that the United States restrict the import of a vast array of art and artifacts, including coins, dating from Chinese prehistory through the early 20th century. The State Department has repeatedly delayed action on the Chinese petition in the face of strong opposition from museum curators, art dealers, auction houses and collectors.

The Chinese request is supported by archaeologists, however, who believe that the antiquities market and the trade in ancient coins encourage the pillage of important historical sites.

The lawsuit also follows a controversial decision by the State Department in July to ban imports of ancient coins from Cyprus. It was the first time the government had barred trade in a broad category of ancient coins, and collectors and dealers were surprised. Archaeologists, who often use coins to help them date finds, supported that ban on the grounds that treasure hunters using metal detectors to search for coins frequently damage significant sites.

The coin collectors described their lawsuit as a last resort, taken only after the State Department ignored Freedom of Information Act requests over the last three years, as well as unsuccessful efforts by two Republican members of Congress, Representative John Culberson of Texas and Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, to persuade the State Department to divulge more about its decision making.

?We have tried every other step,? said Wayne G. Sayles, executive director of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild, one of the groups bringing the suit. ?We are not getting any transparency in the process, and we need that transparency to make sure our position is considered and that our rights are maintained.? The other two plaintiffs are the International Association of Professional Numismatists and the Professional Numismatists Guild.

Darlene Kirk, a spokeswoman for the State Department?s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, said that as a matter of policy, the department would not comment on a pending lawsuit.

Peter K. Tompa, a lawyer who serves as president of the Ancient Coin Collectors Guild and has represented collectors before a committee that advises the State Department on the antiquities trade, said that if the lawsuit succeeds, it may yield evidence that will allow the coin collectors to challenge the ban on Cypriot coin imports.

Mr. Tompa said the collectors suspected that the State Department had imposed the restriction on coins against the advice of its own Cultural Property Advisory Committee ? and perhaps in violation of the procedures established by a 1983 law governing cultural property protection. They want the State Department to release documents that could prove or disprove this assertion.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

$7.85 Million for U.S. Coin, and Extra for a Stamp

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

If anyone doubts the enduring appeal of American currency, a sale completed Thursday of a sparkling 1794 silver dollar should put that to rest. The coin, believed by some experts to be the first United States dollar ever minted, was sold to a nonprofit educational group for $7.85 million, a world record for any coin.

“This is a national treasure,” said the seller, Steven L. Contursi, a California coin dealer who has owned it since 2003. He has exhibited it at a museum in Colorado and at collector events. The buyer, the Cardinal Collection Educational Foundation, is expected to continue publicizing the coin.

Silver coins up to a dollar were authorized by Congress partly to show off the young nation’s economic prowess. Of the 1,578 dollars made that first year, all by hand presses, about 140 have survived. This coin is considered the finest of them, with crisp, lustrous details still visible on the allegorical Lady Liberty’s flowing hair. What appear to be heavy scratches across the coin are actually file marks, made when the coin was struck to ensure its weight in silver was precise.

“The strike is so sharp, it leads me to believe it is the very fist impression of the die. It is easy to surmise that this is probably the first dollar struck in the U.S.” said David Hall, the co-founder of Professional Coin Grading Service, a firm that certifies collectible coins as genuine.

On Saturday, the world’s most valuable stamp changed hands. The sale, in a secretive auction in Geneva, was between unidentified parties for an undisclosed amount. The auctioneer, David Feldman, would say only that the buyer was an international consortium and that the seller was a financial firm auctioning the stamp to collect on a debt by its former owner. “The consignor was very pleased” with the result, he said.

The Swedish stamp of 1857, accidentally printed in yellow instead of green, became the world’s most valuable in the 1990s, in a series of record-setting sales approaching $2.5 million.

The stamp has a glamorous past. The only one of its type ever discovered, it was found by a Swedish schoolboy in 1885, later seized by the French government as reparations after World War I and has since belonged to famous collectors including the king of Romania.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

A Treasure Travels, Inconspicuously

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesOnce the coins reached their destination at the new home of The American Numismatic Society, the trove of coins was quickly unwrapped and filed in the new vault. More Photos >

They didn’t exactly hire two guys with a truck to secretly move one of the world’s largest and most valuable coin collections over the weekend in Manhattan. But they did use five standard-issue moving vans.

No armored-car convoys. No helicopter gunships. No National Guard outriders flourishing automatic weapons. Just sweaty movers, in blue shirts with their names stitched at the front, schlepping 425 plastic packing crates that were filled with treasures trussed in humble bubble wrap and garden-variety vinyl packing tape.

Yes, the New York Police Department provided an escort, but during more than eight hours on Saturday, one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault a mile to the north.

In the end, the move did not become a caper movie.

“The idea was to make this as inconspicuous as possible,” said Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society. “It had to resemble a totally ordinary office move.”

The collection of 800,000 coins, bank notes, medals, commemorative badges, pins, historic advertising tokens, campaign buttons and other artifacts has been amassed during the 150-year existence of the nonprofit society.

It was transported from the society’s high-security headquarters at 96 Fulton Street, in the former Fidelity and Deposit Company building at the corner of William Street, to its future home, a secure $4 million vault and exhibition space 22 blocks away, on the 11th floor of One Hudson Square, at Varick and Canal Streets.

Even as the moving vans shuttled back and forth, the society’s 14 employees began the endlessly tedious work of unpacking the boxes. They began freeing 12,000 metal trays full of coins from their quarter-inch foam packing, then stacking them in their new locations in custom-built cabinets in a vault erected on the concrete floor of a former printing building.

The society’s holdings rival the comprehensiveness and rarity of those in the Smithsonian Institution and comprise “one of the world’s great collections, the equivalent of those in Berlin, Paris and the British Museum,” said Christopher S. Lightfoot, an associate curator in the department of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“It is a vast, encyclopedic collection of the highest quality,” he added.

Of the collection’s value, Dr. Wartenberg Kagan said, “It is priceless because it has so many unique pieces,” adding with deliberate vagueness that experts had valued it in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The collection “is incredibly valuable, so you can understand why they don’t want to publicize exactly how much,” said Rosemary Lazenby, curator of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

During the move, coded numbers on each sealed crate were checked again and again, and “nothing fell off a truck,” said Andrew R. Meadows, the society’s deputy director.

Society staff members were pledged to secrecy about the timing of the move, and “we didn’t tell our movers what the cargo was until the morning of,” said James McVeigh, operations manager of Time Moving and Storage Inc. of Manhattan, referring to the crew of 20 workers.

“How could you not think that there are crazy people out there who want to do crazy things?” he added, noting that he spent six months planning the move with his brother, Tom, another manager of Time Moving.

And so as bright orange rubber-wheeled crates concealing fabulous doubloons rumbled out onto the sidewalk, pedestrians obliviously headed into the Duane Reade two doors away at 130 William Street.

Amid much shouting and hand gesturing, the moving vans barely squeezed past a parked Duane Reade truck on the narrow street as the drivers maneuvered past water and gas main renovation work on Fulton Street.

Then, before arriving at their loading-dock destination on Watts Street, the trucks had to battle Holland Tunnel approaches clotted with weekenders on the way to the Jersey Shore.

“It’s our first coin collection,” said a New York police detective, Gregory Welch, of Emergency Service Unit Truck One, which shadowed the move with hidden heavy weapons “just in case,” along with patrol cars from the First Precinct. He said his unit was accustomed to protecting Federal Reserve gold transfers and gem shipments in the Midtown diamond district.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

NATIONAL BRIEFING | MID-ATLANTIC; Pennsylvania: Family Pressed To Turn Over Rare Coins

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

Heroic Naturalists or Imperialist Dogs? Sit! Fetch! Practice! Uniquely Qualified to Coax the Best Against All Odds, a Beautiful Life In Georgia, disunionists are nearly thwarted by anti-secession forces, while questions of fraud are raised.

The Understudy Takes the Stage at Apple A Room for Debate forum on whether the company’s plan to cut salt, sugar and fat from its food might affect our diets.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Hiding in Plain Sight as Chef, Nanny, Author

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

But Mr. Seidl was not only writing under a pen name; it turns out he was also living under one.

In 1975, Mr. Seidl was arrested on federal charges that he tried to extort $10,000 from a leading rare-coin dealership in Manhattan; the government said he sent a letter threatening to damage the firm’s reputation if it did not pay.

He jumped bail and became a fugitive. Then, last November, while in the hospital with chest pains, Mr. Seidl, now 63, feared he was dying and decided to surrender to the authorities. Once out of the hospital, he dialed the city’s 311 line from a pay phone. The police showed up and handed him over to the F.B.I. He was released on his own recognizance after a month in jail and is now living in a men’s shelter on Manhattan’s East Side, awaiting his next court hearing.

“I said to myself, well, let me just clean everything up,” explained Mr. Seidl. “I mean, it was a wrong thing I did long time ago.”

New York has had its share of notorious fugitives, like members of the radical group the Weather Underground, who avoided the authorities for extended periods. Mr. Seidl never made the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted List, but his survival underground suggests that an obscure figure who takes the proper precautions can remain undetected almost indefinitely in this city of anonymity. Even, it turns out, if he is lugging a suitcase full of paperbacks to bars and restaurants, and signing them, albeit with an alias, for anyone who turns up.

“Once he made the decision to hide under a rock,” said Kenneth T. Jackson, a Columbia University historian and the editor of “The Encyclopedia of New York City,” “this is a pretty good rock to hide under because it’s so diverse, dense, tolerant — in short so mixed up, so who noticed him?”

The United States attorney’s office declined to comment on the case, and Robert M. Baum, Mr. Seidl’s lawyer, would not let his client discuss the charges against him as well as some aspects of his time as a fugitive. And many details Mr. Seidl provided about his life could not be independently verified.

A Czech who also speaks Spanish and German, Mr. Seidl said in a series of recent interviews that he served in the Czechoslovak Army in the 1960s, including in counterintelligence, but fled after the 1968 Soviet invasion. “I have about 100 different ways how not to get caught,” he noted.

In 1969, Mr. Seidl was accepted as a refugee into the United States, Mr. Baum said, and later received his green card.

It was in 1975 that Mr. Seidl and two others were accused in the plot to extort $10,000 from the coin firm, Stack’s, government court papers show. According to the filings, Mr. Seidl’s letter threatened, “By donating this sum, you would be saving yourselves your families and business much consternation.”

Representatives of Stack’s declined to comment.

In a court document, Mr. Baum noted that “there is no allegation of violence or force” against his client. Mr. Seidl said he decided to jump bail after a lawyer said he would receive a 12-year sentence, and he panicked. “I didn’t want to spend 12 years in a prison,” he said.

He said he moved to Boston for a few months, then returned to New York. He abandoned his apartment near Union Square and his factory job, cut his hair and beard in a different style, and wore different clothes. He said he chose the alias Gerald Conteh because it was short and simple. He avoided driving, and did not apply for a license or a passport. When he did occasionally travel, to places like Atlantic City, he took the bus and bought his tickets with cash.

He said that he never married, avoided old friends, and did not reveal his secret to new ones. “I couldn’t tell anybody,” Mr. Seidl said. Mr. Baum, the lawyer, added, “He created his own prison for more than 30 years.”

It was a prison with rather flexible walls. Mr. Seidl said he took jobs in bars, delis and restaurants, and eventually began writing recipe guides for muffins, cookies and other desserts; vinaigrettes and marinades; and what he called “coffee creations.” He also wrote a guide on how to start a restaurant, including scouting locations, marketing and developing food lines.

“He understood the business from the beginning to the end,” said Mary Tierney, owner of Tierney Fine Foods in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, who got to know the man she called Gerry in the 1990s when he worked in a commissary that supplied the gourmet food stores she was managing.

He later worked for about nine years as a nanny in Marine Park, Brooklyn, shepherding a girl and boy who are now 8 and 11 to playgrounds and helping them learn to read and write.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Now if Only We Could Mint Lincoln Himself

Posted on January 25, 2011 by numis

On Abraham Lincoln’s 200th birthday this Thursday, most Americans will probably continue to consign the penny that bears his whiskered profile to their change jars, toss it into public fountains and otherwise treat it as an annoying trifle.

Shame on them. Humble though its copper-coated zinc corpus may be, the Lincoln cent represents a triumph of American iconography in miniature. Before its debut in 1909, no actual person had been depicted on a regular-denomination circulating United States coin.

This was no accident. Emperors, kings and other authority figures had long projected their power by stamping their faces on loose change. In 1791, Congress was set to follow their example by impressing the likeness of our first head of state, George Washington, on our metal money. Succeeding presidents would appear on coins struck after they were elected.

But Washington argued against the idea, deeming it too “monarchical.”

“It smacked of royalty,” said David W. Lange, director of research for Numismatic Guaranty Corporation in Sarasota, Fla. “It was not a good omen for a new republic.”

So the Mint Act of 1792 mandated that there would instead “be an impression emblematic of liberty” on our standard coinage. On the front, this usually constituted an idealized, goddess-like figure. The solution was practical and patriotic enough to hold sway through the 19th century.

Unfortunately, this familiarity bred contempt. Artists at the United States Mint took the liberty motif so much for granted that some of their designs grew dowdy and uninspired. In 1892, one newspaper declared that the liberty image that Charles Barber, the mint’s chief engraver, had put on the country’s new dime, quarter and half-dollar resembled “the ignoble Emperor Vitellius with a goiter.”

President Theodore Roosevelt had his own thoughts. In 1904, he complained to Secretary of the Treasury Leslie Mortimer Shaw, “Our coinage is artistically of atrocious hideousness.”

In 1908, Roosevelt suggested that the Lithuanian-born sculptor Victor David Brenner, who had created a Lincoln plaque that the president admired, replicate his handiwork on a circulating coin. Early in 1909, Mr. Brenner wrote to the mint’s director, Frank A. Leach, that an image of Lincoln would “compose very well” on our one-cent piece.

And it did, with little if any official objection. Indeed, when it was released to the public on Aug. 2, 1909, the Lincoln cent was a hit. At banks and Treasury buildings in New York, Washington, Boston and other cities, long lines formed to snap the coins up. In Philadelphia, some entrepreneurs sold them for as much as 25 cents apiece.

So much for Washington’s “monarchical” concerns.

“Lincoln was quintessentially a man of freedom,” said Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum. “So there couldn’t be much question about it from that standpoint. Also, Lincoln was dead at that point. He was an icon. It wasn’t as if Teddy Roosevelt had suggested putting himself on the coin.”

Q. David Bowers, author of “A Guide Book of Lincoln Cents,” said, “The Lincoln was the first coin in the hands of the public where they said, ‘Hey, I know who that is.’ It was new and exciting.”

Not everyone was excited. Confederate veterans naturally grumbled. The New York Times inveighed against the coin’s “rather poor design” and called it “another ill-considered freak of Mr. Roosevelt’s will.”

Today, the complaints about the Lincoln penny are quite different. Thanks to rising metal prices, the cost of making it (1.4 cents) exceeds its face value. Critics also charge that counting out pennies during purchases and parceling them into 50-cent rolls for deposit in banks costs companies more than $300 million annually in lost productivity. A small but persistent chorus wants to scrap the cent entirely.

They face an uphill battle. This year, the mint is releasing a series of four new images on the reverse of the Lincoln cent, each one depicting a different stage of Lincoln’s life. Mint officials hope that the novelty might generate some of the popularity that greeted its recent 50 State Quarters program.

Mr. Bowers said he thought that the economy, the new administration, and other current events have overshadowed this radical redesign.

“If the timing had been different,” he said, “the news about the Lincoln reverses would have been on the front page of USA Today.”

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Change We Don’t Need

Posted on January 24, 2011 by numis

LAST year Congress passed legislation that will have a long-term impact on our pocket change. The law authorized a new series of quarters, to be released over 11 years, with at least 56 different designs featuring national parks or sites.

This new series is just one of several rotating coin design programs that have come in the wake of the success of the 50 State Quarters Program, in which the Mint issued a new quarter design five times a year for 10 years, starting in 1999. In 2004 the Mint started the Westward Journey nickel series. In 2007 we got a series of dollar coins with former presidents. One of the coins recently issued features William Henry Harrison, who was president for only a month.

By now we are experiencing new coin fatigue: authorization of the national parks quarter series attracted very little mainstream attention, while many coin collectors disapproved of it as too much of a good thing.

These critics have a point. This year we have even more coin programs featuring rotating designs. For Lincoln’s 200th birthday, four different reverse (tails) designs were produced for the penny. American Indians will be honored with a new series of dollar coins. And six quarters will be issued featuring the District of Columbia as well as the territories of Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands.

As a result of all this, this year we will have more coin series with rotating designs than series with permanent designs. We may find ourselves thankful for the constancy of the Jefferson nickel, the Roosevelt dime and the Kennedy half-dollar, which is no longer even issued for circulation.

While it may seem as if the Mint is to blame for all this, the problem really lies with Congress. The issuing of new coins, including the specific details on each coin’s design, is mandated by legislation. These coins can be lucrative for the government: the Mint estimated that the 50 State Quarters Program earned nearly $3 billion in seigniorage (that is, the difference between the face value of a coin and the cost to mint it).

Coins are a medium of exchange. They should be relatively standard, universally identifiable units of money. On a deeper level, coins are also representations of the country that issues them. Our currency has become a shifting, unidentifiable mess that tries to recognize everything and ends up symbolizing nothing.

The best remedy would simply be to overhaul all our standard coin designs. Redesign each denomination across the board, and leave the new designs in place for at least a decade. These redesigned coins should be contemporary in nature but timeless in theme, and unmistakable objects of art.

It was once common to portray Liberty, personified in female form, on our coins. Imagine the return of this figure, grown wiser and reflective after her absence, evoking confidence that our nation will endure any hardship and meet any challenge. Then, maybe our coins will once again become respected national symbols.

Michael Zielinski is the creator of CoinNetwork.com, a social network for coin collectors.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Rare Coins: Family Treasure or Ill-Gotten Goods?

Posted on January 24, 2011 by numis

Roy Langbord had guessed that someone in his family might have hidden away a great treasure decades before, but not until his mother had him check a long-neglected safe-deposit box did he realize just how great it was.

Skip to next paragraph The double eagle coin of 1933 is extremely rare and valuable.

Ruby Washington/The New York TimesRoy Langbord, right, and his lawyer Barry H. Berke are seeking coins seized by the government.

Inside the box, opened in 2003, he found an incredibly rare coin, wrapped in a delicate paper sleeve. It was a gold $20 piece with Lady Liberty on one side, a bald eagle flying across the other and, at Liberty’s left, the four digits that made it so valuable: 1933.

The famous “double eagles” from that year were never officially released by the government. Only a few had ever made their way out of federal vaults, and only one had ever been sold publicly, in 2002. The price: $7.6 million.

And there were nine more of them in the safe-deposit box.

But after the Langbord family took the coins to the United States Mint to be authenticated in 2004, they got a rude surprise. The Mint said the coins were genuine and kept them.

The government claims that they are government property stolen from the Mint, most likely in the 1930s, by Mr. Langbord’s grandfather, Israel Switt, a Philadelphia jewelry dealer.

The Langbords went to court and recently won an important ruling. A United States District Court judge has given the government until the end of the month either to give back the coins or go back to court to prove that they were in fact stolen by Mr. Switt, a daunting task after three-quarters of a century.

Nearly a half-million 1933 double eagles were minted before President Franklin D. Roosevelt, shifting the nation away from the gold standard, issued an executive order that made owning large amounts of gold bullion and coins illegal. Two of the coins went to the Smithsonian Institution, and almost all the rest were melted down.

Some, however, escaped that fate, including the coin sold in 2002, which had made its way into the collection of King Farouk of Egypt and later the hands of a British dealer. The government had seized that coin, too, and arrested the dealer, Stephen Fenton. But Mr. Fenton’s lawyer, Barry H. Berke, reached a settlement that allowed that single coin to be issued officially and sold at auction, with the government taking half of the proceeds.

Mr. Langbord, an entertainment industry executive, said he first learned about his family’s involvement with the storied coins in 2002 on a flight to Las Vegas, when he read an account of the Farouk coin’s odyssey in an advertisement for the auction. He was stunned, he said, to see that the dealer who first procured the coin was his grandfather. When Mr. Langbord got off the plane, he said, he called his mother, Joan Langbord, and asked, “Do we have any more of these?” About a year later, the search turned up the safe-deposit box in Philadelphia.

The Secret Service, which polices currency crimes, has argued that all of the double eagles that escaped government control passed through the hands of Mr. Switt, working with a corrupt cashier at the Mint. A Mint spokesman declined to comment on the case because of the litigation.

According to a history of the coins by Alison Frankel, a journalist with The American Lawyer, a United States attorney decided not to prosecute Mr. Switt in the mid-1940s, saying the statute of limitations had passed.

Ms. Frankel wrote in her 2006 book “Double Eagle: The Epic Story of the World’s Most Valuable Coin” that Mr. Switt was “a thoroughly nasty piece of work,” and that a dealer who traded with him called him a “gold coin bootlegger” who continued to sell gold coins long after the practice had been prohibited. The book details the government’s contention that Mr. Switt worked with a corrupt Mint cashier.

Mr. Berke counters such arguments by quoting the Secret Service report on the coins, which explicitly admitted that its investigation “did not conclusively establish when, how or by whom the coins found in circulation were taken from the Philadelphia Mint.”

The Langbords insist that Mr. Switt, who died in 1990, acquired the coins legitimately before the ban, most likely through a gold-for-gold exchange process used by the Mint in those days.

In fact, Mr. Berke said, Mr. Switt was a frequent visitor to the Mint, had plenty of gold to trade for gold coins and probably did so. Proving otherwise will be extremely difficult, he said. “There’s really nobody with contemporary knowledge from the Mint who’s still living,” he said, having sought out former Mint employees for the earlier litigation.

In an interview, Ms. Frankel called Mr. Berke’s success in persuading the judge to shift the burden of proof onto the government in the case “quite an amazing accomplishment” that forces the government “to prove a negative — that the coins could not have gotten out legally.”

Armen Vartian, the general counsel of the Professional Numismatists Guild, agreed. “Nobody can prove conclusively what happened,” Mr. Vartian said. “Anybody who has to do that, I think, is going to fail.”

Mr. Vartian said he would be happy if the Langbords were allowed to sell the coins. “Maybe they were stolen in the 1930s,” he said, “but they certainly weren’t stolen by the people who are holding them now.”

Mr. Fenton, the coin dealer who sold the Farouk double eagle, said that if the coins were allowed to be sold, he would advise selling just one or two a year. With the right timing and a good market, he said, they could bring $4 million to $6 million each, because there are many people who would want to own one.

“This coin,” he said, “has got so much charisma.”

More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on September 16, 2009, on page A17 of the New York edition.

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Values on Rise for Rare Collectibles

Posted on January 24, 2011 by numis

In the fall of 2005, Charles Hack, a New Yorker who has made a fortune in real estate and spent a lot of it on old master paintings and Renaissance sculpture, noticed a newspaper advertisement for an auction of a rare stamp.

Skip to next paragraph A poster from the 1935 movie “Bride of Frankenstein” sold for $334,600 last week.

Robert A. Siegel Auction GalleriesThe Inverted Jenny, only 100 of which are known to exist.

The 24-cent airmail stamp issued in 1918, popularly known to collectors as the Inverted Jenny, became famous ? and valuable ? because of an error: the airplane in the center of the design, a Curtiss JN-4, is printed upside-down. Only 100 of the misprints are known to exist. Mr. Hack attended that auction and bought the stamp for $297,000, including commission.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Hack attended another stamp auction, at Siegel Auction Galleries in New York City, and went home with a second Inverted Jenny after bidding $850,000. The final price, with the commission, came to $977,500, a record for an American stamp sold at auction and a confirmation of a trend that is transforming the world of high-end collectibles.

His second Inverted Jenny cost more because it is one of the finest, but auction prices for many rare and high-quality collectibles, including coins and memorabilia, have gone up significantly in recent months.

Just in the past week, a collection of American pattern coins ? rare samples made to show off proposed designs, like tests for the first United States pennies in 1792 ? was traded for $30 million between an anonymous buyer and seller. The deal, brokered by Legend Numismatics of Lincroft, N.J., doubled the previous record for a coin collection. And a rare and pristine poster for the 1935 movie ?Bride of Frankenstein,? starring Boris Karloff, was sold Wednesday by Heritage Auction Galleries of Dallas for $334,600, which included commission.

The seller of the poster had bought it from a theater owner in the 1960s for 50 cents, said Greg Rohan, president and co-owner of Heritage.

Mr. Hack, 60, collected stamps in his youth, but decided to pursue fine art as he began making money in residential and commercial real estate around the country. Among his specialties are Belgian symbolist painters like Fernand Khnopff, whose works are rare and not widely collected. Now, he has returned to philately with a dedication comparable to his passion for art.

?Stamps have a parallel quality to fine art ? this thing gives a satisfaction, it?s a great piece of Americana,? Mr. Hack said last week.

Sonny Hagendorf, a dealer in rare stamps who has guided Mr. Hack in his collecting over the last two years, said there were a number of reasons why stamp prices were rising: the weak dollar, low interest rates, the fact that stamps are ?undervalued vis-a-vis coins and paper money? and other collectibles. But he said a major influence on the robust market for rare stamps were baby boomers in their 50s and 60s who are ?getting to the point where they can buy the things they want.?

Mr. Hack is a prime example of that.

?Boomers like myself reach 60, have incredible wealth, and are thinking about places to put it,? he said. ?In fine art, even mediocre pieces by well-known artists bring a million dollars.?

The Inverted Jenny, he said, is ?an American icon that is really undervalued.?

Mr. Rohan, of Heritage, said prices of other collectibles like vintage science fiction books had been rising for the same reason. ?Sci-fi especially has been coming on stronger, as people in technology fields reach their 40s. They read these as kids,? and want to capture the nostalgia, he said.

Mr. Rohan was also bidding on the Inverted Jenny on Wednesday on behalf of a Heritage client, but lost out to Mr. Hack. He said this client, like many of those who buy regularly from Heritage, collected in several areas: coins, paper money, movie posters, art and sculpture. ?These are passionate collectors ? they remember as a child these things were trophies.?

Mr. Hagendorf has seen prices on rare stamps rise before. He said he bought the very same stamp that was sold on Wednesday in 1980 for $160,000, then a record, on behalf of a pension fund. The stamp has changed hands several times since then.

?Back then it was speculative,? he said, with buyers trying to hedge against inflation. Nowadays, buyers tend to be real collectors, with the ?slightly irrational desire to own the item.?

?Lately we?re seeing auctions with multiple collectors and many under-bidders up to a very high level,? Mr. Hagendorf said. ?This is a vibrant market with a long way to go, but it?s not just driven by its going up.?

View the original article here

Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Your Time Is Now at Numis Network

Posted on December 31, 2010 by numis

Budding entrepreneurs with a vision to create and change a completely new industry, this one’s for you-you can now fulfill your dream of a lifetime to earn more money through something that is unique and yet timeless: silver and gold coins! Yes, through the Numis Network, you’ll be able to build for yourself a nifty collection of these valuable items. Read on through this Numis Network review to find out what kind of lucrative moneymaking opportunity awaits you.

A pioneer in the selling of various gold and silver numismatic coins, this completely new industry, found in Numisnetwork.com, allows you to sell these babies through network marketing. It’s all about collecting, preserving and creating wealth, as this business aspires to be first in the graded silver and gold numismatic coin industry by providing countless opportunities for one to really financially benefit from this hot trend.

There is truly something inherently magical about gold and silver coins, and as celebrity numismatic specialist Mike Mezack always stresses, “If you are going to collect something, it might as well be money!”

For those who are not familiar with the term ‘numismatic’, this simply refers to the science of money collection. Numismatic coins are collectors’ items, and they vary in value depending on the type you are able to procure. Usually, it is the quality and condition of the coin that determines its overall value-more is placed on a coin that has been preserved well over the years

?Numis Network boasts of a fabulous compensation plan for network marketers who are willing and passionate enough to take on this brand-new industry, featuring a BBS Online Marketing System that gives you a personalized Numis website that contains all the information you need to know about the trade, a personal automated back office business center, your very own ShopNumis.com and NumisOne.com website and useful educational videos featuring Mark Apsolon. All these combined equip you with all the necessary tools and resources you need to succeed in the craft, as well as provide you direct access and connections to your consumers, giving you the chance to service them better.

Get to know the business behind Numis Network and you will surely fall head over heels in love with it. You will find that the core group behind this business is comprised of several visionary minds, all of which are dedicated to further awareness and appreciation of the numismatic coin industry. The head honchos include Ian Cordell (Founder and President), Christopher Kent (Founder and EVP), Jake Kevorkian (Founder and EVP) and Mike Mezack, expert numismatist.

Join Numis Network today with Lawrence Tam (4 star rep in 5 days online) to get in depth online and offline marketing methods to grow your business.

Get additional information about the only home business where the product is real gold and silver with Lawrence Tam.




Share
|





Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment