The Opalka Gallery at the local Sage College has a great event called “Pecha Kucha Night;” they’re held all the world. A bunch of presenters each shows and talks about 20 slides, each shown for exactly 20 seconds. I did one recently. It was quite a challenge to time my verbiage so that it matched up with the slides. Here’s my presentation:
Hello. My topic is my 60 year love affair with numismatics, which is the fancy word for coin collecting. It has enriched my life beyond measure. Eventually it took over my life, and I quit my real job and became a full time coin dealer. I’ll show you a couple of pictures of my coin office.
This is a small part of my “fulfillment center,” coins I have for sale. I assure you it’s very well organized, and I can locate any coin to fill an order. Usually. By the way, I sell coins only by mail. Quite a lot of them, as this picture suggests.
Now, often coins require some research, and here’s a picture of part of my numismatic library. Much of this kind of research can now be done on the internet, but it hasn’t totally replaced the need for reference books.
And speaking of books, I did write one myself about coin collecting, in 1992, called “Confessions of a Numismatic Fanatic.” Note the subtle, understated color I picked for the cover. Almost nobody noticed that the coins on it form a smiley face.
I’m going to focus tonight on just two things. The first is ancient coins, which I especially love. Here’s one from Parion, in what is now Turkey, around 300 BC. Every Greek city had its own coins. The face is Medusa. Supposedly, seeing it would turn you to stone. But this picture is safe to look at.
Now, that coin is in superb condition, which is rare. Quality is the name of this game. Here we see the more typical condition for ancient coins. I bought this boxful of junk to re-sell. But when it comes to my own collection, I’m very much a condition snob.
The next coin, from Larissa, is notable for its artistic quality. Also, it happens to come from the greatest collection of Greek coins ever formed. That collector is still around, he’s actually bought coins from me; my wife and I once had dinner with him in Athens. (And with his full time librarian.)
Next is a coin from the Roman Republic. This depicts the story of Tarpeia; she’s the figure in the center; with two soldiers bashing her to death with their shields. I’m showing this delightful coin to illustrate how ancient people had a different mentality about violence.
The main thing I want to illustrate is portraiture on ancient coins. Often again the artistry was pretty amazing. Here is Alexander the Great. He really had an amazing career. Note that he’s depicted deified with the horn of Ammon, an Egyptian God.
The next guy is not so famous: Philetairos, the eunuch king of Pergamon. One time my toddler daughter climbed into my lap while I had a coin like this in my hand. I explained to her that it had a picture of an ancient king. And she asked me: “Was he nice?” I had to say probably not.
And here we have Cleopatra. A realistic portrait. She was not in fact a great beauty. This coin is actually more worn than I like to have in my collection, but it’s fairly rare, and about as good a portrait coin of Cleopatra as you can get.
Next we have her lover boy, Julius Caesar. “Yuli-oos KAI-sar” as the Romans would have pronounced it. He was the first guy who dared to put his own portrait on a Roman coin. It was one of the things that got him assassinated; it was felt he had too much power.
The next coin is Caligula’s. I’m showing you the back, because this was again something unprecedented — it names and depicts Caligula’s three sisters. Whom he slept with, at least according to the ancient historian Suetonius, who wrote “The Twelve Caesars.”
Here we have another famously disreputable Emperor, Nero. His coin portraits are particularly impressive. Now this is the kind of condition quality I like in my collection. This is a bronze coin; notice the beautiful green patina. This is a coin to die for.
Next is Hadrian, another superb portrait. Look at this artistry. And again, a bronze coin. I do have some gold ones, but I really much prefer bronze and silver. The reason is that for the price of a very routine ho-hum gold coin, you can get a fantastic bronze.
This is the last portrait: Antinous. Who was he? The boy toy of the previous guy, Hadrian. (Do you think there’s too much sex in my talk?) Antinous seems to have killed himself at age 21 because he felt he’d lost the bloom of youth. This coin is from Egypt and is very rare.
Now for the second part we jump to the early 19th century, and a little tin coin from Palembang, a Sultanate on Sumatra. A few years ago I happened to discover that quantities of these coins, apparently recovered from a river, were being sold quite cheap by several guys in Indonesia.
So I e-mailed each of them: how many have you got? Want to make a deal? I wound up with 35,000 coins. This picture shows just a portion. The cool thing is that these coins come in many variations, which had never been properly studied and catalogued.
So I decided to tackle it myself, and published a little book. It was a monumental job to sort through all those coins to make sense of them; I now have a real appreciation for just how big a number 35,000 is. In the end, I identified 18 distinct issues, with 291 significant varieties.
This final picture shows two sample pages from the book. And in case you’re wondering, I have sold thousands of these coins, but still have many thousands left. So if any of you are interested in a great deal on Palembang coins, you can see me outside.
Thank you!
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