The most important finds in numismatics are not usually made by the specialist dealers or collectors who have spent years tracking down particular rarities. These finds are often made through the auction houses that source coins from established collectors. These finds are important enough to the market for numismatic coins to be sustained.
But perhaps the most breathtaking discoveries in the saleroom are those made from collections that have not been catalogued or documented in any way. These collections are often discovered as a box, tin, or cabinet of drawers that has been left in an estate, the contents of which no one who lives in the house is aware of. For Coin Auctioneers, visit https://www.hoskerhaynes.com
The reason for these archives is usually the same. Each of these collectors knew exactly what they were collecting. They bought, researched, and documented their purchases with a system that made sense to them but to no one else. These collections sat undisturbed for years and sometimes even decades without anyone outside of the collector passing on the necessary knowledge to the next generation of the collector’s family.
When material like this reaches the hands of a specialist for the first time, the cataloguing process becomes an act of genuine discovery. When one examines the artwork closely, one finds that it is a rare piece that is so scarce that the last time it was auctioned off was forty years ago.
The uncatalogued collection is akin to an unexplored archive. What’s inside is genuinely unknown until someone who knows what to look for actually looks.
