Thursday, June 8, 2017

Museum and Auction House Work Together To Reunite Collector With His Coins

This is a great story about the efforts of Virginia State authorities, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and CNG, Inc. to find the owner of a box of ancient coins that had been lost.  A happy ending about how government officials and private industry worked together to reunite a collector with his collection.
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3 comments:

  1. BenJune 10, 2017 at 10:00 PM

    So dealers can work out years afterwards who they SOLD coins to, but do not have proper records where the coins came from... That's pretty poor business practice isn't it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Cultural Property ObserverJune 11, 2017 at 5:39 AM

    The museum noticed that the coins had CNG tags on them. They called the auction house which is big enough to have a database of who they sell to. I suspect they know who they bought their coins from too, but likely not who they bought from purchased from unless it was from a recognizeable dealer and the collector kept that information. Keep also in mind that this is one of the biggest and most sophisticated auction houses in the coin trade so they have a better database than most. In fact, they are also generous enough to make their database available on the public so they can research coins too. Just go to their website and hit the button that says research. That, however, is a lot different than being able to prove all coins on the market were out of a place like Cyprus as of 2007 for example. I would not talk about others' business practices unless you yourself keep records of all antiques you may have purchased over the years.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Voz EarlJuly 6, 2017 at 9:19 AM

    The link is not working on my phone. Just takes me to the news home page.

    BTW did you see the story about Hobby Lobby getting fined?

    http://www.breitbart.com/news/hobby-lobby-fined-3m-for-smuggling-iraq-religious-artifacts/

    ReplyDelete

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