E-Auction 45, closing Wednesday, November 9th 2022, is online now! Print copies are being sent this week, if you are not on our mailing list and would like a copy please let us know.

This catalog is very much a story of consignors. Seven different collectors are represented in this sale, and their efforts and taste are an important part of what this catalog represents. We write the descriptions, the grading and the estimates, but the pieces themselves reflect what was important to the past owners.

Some of our consignors have small sections in this catalog reflecting adjustments to their current interests. Other consignments represent someone letting go. One such collection is a continuation of our offering of a large collection of crowns and crown size pieces-the US 1798 and 1846 dollars are his. Rather than offer his entire collection at once, we have been spreading it out over a few sales. We are also introducing coins from another consignor whom we have known personally for many years as a Minnesota collector who would often stop by our table when we used to attend local shows. He formed a particularly well-thought-out and appealing collection of Greek and Roman coins and 20 of his pieces are an important part of the ancient section of this catalog.

Another consignment comes from one of the leading scholars in the numismatic community, Robert W Hoge, who sent a small widely varied tranche of pieces. In addition to possessing a distinguished corpus of publications and academic and museum posts, he was Curator of the American Numismatic Association (ANA) Money Museum in Colorado Springs in 1981, followed by his post serving as Curator of North American Coins and Currency at the American Numismatic Society in New York. (He is now Curator Emeritus.) He has pursued some specialized areas of interest as a collector and it is a select group of coins from that collection that we are offering here. Each of his lots is designated as The RWH Collection. He provided detailed descriptions for each of his coins which we will provide to each purchaser along with the lot. (For reasons of space we have shortened the descriptions and have made our own grading notes.)

The most significant consignment in this catalog of 325 lots is a group of 133 coins from the estate of Patrick Zabel, an advanced collector who did business with many U.S. and British dealers in the latter part of the 20th century. He was a collector with wide-ranging interests and he put together significant representations of important parts of numismatic history. In this catalog we have sampled pieces from different aspects of his collection-ancient Greece and Rome, British Celtic and Anglo-Saxon, Spanish America, European. There is much more to come.

The collection of Mexican coins he formed covers the history of Mexico as it grew from a colony of Spain to the modern Mexican state. He well represented America's first coinage as it occurred under Charles (Carlos) and Johanna. In addition to several silver pieces from their reign he also had a rare 4 maravedis piece-the first copper coin of Mexico-a particularly rare variety with the name beginning with a Most of the rest of Mexico's changing governments are well represented-the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Bourbon rulers, the brief Empire of Iturbide, the First Republic, then the brief Maximilian Empire followed by the Second Republic and the United States of Mexico-the history of a nation in 65 lots. You will see Revolutionary Mexico in a later sale.

A few pieces from his Anglo-Saxon coinage are also here. This is one of the better Anglo-Saxon collections to appear on the market in recent years. That collection will be the feature for our major February 2023 sale, our special annual sale where we offer the best of what we have been able to find over the year. You can see a preview of that particular on the back cover of the print catalog or by opening the virtual catalog on the website.

The offering of British trade tokens includes some marvelous pieces from Baldwin's basement I came upon while researching my update of Dalton & Hamer in the 1980s, and others from the iconic Jim Noble Sale I attended in Melbourne in 1998.

When I began these notes I was contemplating the pleasures of ownership, inevitably a transient experience. And it led me to admiring the efforts serious collectors make to create some order for an area. For most, it is a private form of scholarship, of travel through time, of developing a deepening understanding of something. And finally, it is satisfying to realize that what we and others have appreciated and enjoyed for a time will now become a source of appreciation and enjoyment for many others as well.

For more information, see:
https://davcoin.com/