Purchasing From A Museum

,. .,. And I like Your question.Hope others will post- I say a Museum never sells to general public (Other Museums yes).

I think it would depend on the museum, are we talking the Louvre, or are we talking Idaho state museum? Small museums don't have the cash flow to maintain a large variety, and might over time sell items. they may also trade with other museums. I think the other person is correct if they have something of significant value, they would put it in a very reputable auction house.

I've not heard of any museum selling any of their collections. Museum collections are made up of their holdings alone with collections that are on loan from other museums and private collections. Also collections are donated to a museum from benefactors that have passed away. With that being said if their holdings get too large I'm sure that a museum might consider selling off some of the less valuable pieces.

It does depend in part of the nature of the museum and the nature of the items being sold. The Museum of Ancient Greek Coins would not sell any of it's ancient Greek coins; the whole purpose of such a museum would be to acquire, store, preserve and display exactly those items. But if someone donated some ancient Greek coins to the Tri-County Square Dancing Museum, then yes, they probably would sell them... or perhaps pass them on to another museum that actually wanted them.

But as a general rule, no, museums almost never sell off their collections and on the rare occasions they do, they never have a "fire sale" and offer things for sale from the museum premises you can just walk in and buy. What you are much more likely to be able to obtain from a museum gift shop is replicas, since they have no ethical problem with selling replicas.

You need to understand, there is a war out there. On one side are the museums, archaeologists, academics and historians. On the other are the collectors, dealers and metal detectorists. The first group generally believe that the past is our common heritage and must be preserved, preferably in publically-funded hands since private individuals can't be trusted with it. They believe artefacts are priceless and should never be assigned "market values" at all; that's why the County Museum guys on shows like Pawn Stars never ever talk about value, no matter how much the pawnbroker wants them to. Collectors and the collecting industry that goes along with it are The Enemy: it is our fault that the artefacts they would like to acquire cost so much. And it is our fault that looters and smugglers are tempted to break local laws to steal antiquities to sell them overseas, smashing and destroying archaeology in the process.

In some countries, the anti-collectors are in the ascendancy and collectors there are persecuted like a minority ethnic or religious group in a totalitarian state. In others, such as Britain, there is an uneasy truce. But the co-operation between the two factions is still very minimal. Case in point: the British Museum used to offer a free public coin identification service; anyone could simply walk in and ask the experts there to ID their coins. Last year, they found out that (shock! gasp! the horror!) coin collectors and even coin dealers were amongst those using their service. So they changed policy: the service is still free but you need to provide acceptable provenance documentation for non-British coins before they will ID them for you. And "I bought it from a coin dealer" is not acceptable provenance, unless you can prove you bought it before 1970.

Just to add to what I wrote previously (in an attempt to create a clearer tie-in to the topic): Museums do occasionally sell off ("deaccess" is the proper word, actually) artifacts, but rarely coins. The irony is that there are likely many thousands of coins (Wayne Sayles, in "Ancient Coin Collecting," speculates there are millions) sitting, unstudied and unseen and unappreciated, in museums' and academic institutions' storage areas around the world. I'm not suggesting these should necessarily be on the market...but rather pointing out that it is a sad situation.

Very interesting...and thanks to everyone for their insights. I've emailed a few museums in several countries, including the UK and Canada (where I am). So far, the only museum to respond has been the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. They said that they would forward my query to the world cultures department, who 'should reply shortly'.

I was hoping that a given museum might have a surplus of a particular sort of coin, and therefore be willing to sell it in order to raise funds for another type of coin or other artifact... But I suppose that they may simply elect to exchange it with another museum instead.

I have about 800 unattributed silver crusader coins (a minority, about 15 of these, are Levon; the remainder are a mixture of Mamluk, Ayyubid, and Mongolian/genghis khan coins - I thought that potentially they may even be willing to trade depending on what they were looking for themselves.