As a nondriver, shows can be difficult for me to reach. The Baltimore shows are an easy Greyhound ride down the Interstate, and I attend pretty much all of them. Historically, they've never really reached their billing for me; there are usually odd, glaring lacks for such a large bourse. That was not the case for this show. It was, in one sentence, easily the best Baltimore I've attended for breadth and depth of offerings. There was truly something - a lot of somethings - for everyone (with a couple oddities noted below). Except (thank goodness for relatively depressed gold prices) the usual stacks of bullion-level St. Gaudens and other pretty gold lumps. I did not miss them.
I walked down the steps inside the Convention Center (the bourse is below ground level) just as the doors were opening at 10:00. As a guess, there were 100+ people waiting to get in. An odd note: The Whitman show website had an arrangement for preregistration which resulted in a barcoded paper you could print, to scan at the site and automatically receive your nametag (required for entry). When I got there, the folks manning the desk not only had no hardware to make use of that paper, they also had the usual mandate of requiring photo ID in person from every attendee. Could you possibly get the one hand with the other on this, Whitman? A persistent registration from regulars, confirmed in person the first time and keyed to an online identification known only to the regular, would be nice here.
Copper: Boy, was there ever copper. The usual bigger players in copper - Col. Ellsworth, Reynolds, McCawley, etc. - were there loaded for war, and if your need ran to a high-level example of anything copper before 1850, you would have had multiple examples to choose from regardless of issue or year. There was no counting the number of five-figure coppers I saw in displays. The selection was not limited to the high end, or to slabbed examples, either. The usual box after box of FE and later Cents in affordable grades was found at a dozen-plus tables. Early Copper, raw, in well-circulated grades was downright
common. This would have been the show to purchase a cheap 18th Century Cent if you wanted one. You would have had to make a dozen stops just for the dealers who had ten or more raw examples of that single niche on display. Midgrade, slab-worthy copper was plentiful. It seemed like everybody had slabbed Braided Hair and later Cents and if you wanted the finer examples of such, well, the Penny Lady alone had you covered and she had competition.
One thing that stood out was the relative scarcity of 1909-S VDB's. Not that you couldn't find an example in whatever grade you wished; just that they weren't disproportionately represented as one usually sees.
That coin, I think, is among those hoarded by dealers who approach the business strictly from an investment standpoint, and whose actions tend to track metal pricing. With metals being low (on the 5-year scale), they're likely in Buy Mode instead of Sell, being unable to achieve even the narrow margins they operate on. Yes, this construes as "elitist," but in my opinion more's the pity. I didn't miss them.
Silver: You couldn't swing a cat. In a crowded bourse, you could have spit in a random direction and it would have been more likely for Type Silver, in any grade, to have gotten wet than a person. I do not, of course, endorse that sort of testing regimen; better to take my word.
Doesn't matter what your concentration was, or what grade from melt to Top Pop, if you needed silver it was there. Scrap buckets, bulk boxes of 2x2's, slabbed in every grade, common and rarities. It was there. And Morgans? Good golly, the Morgans. One expects a vast quantity of Morgans at every show, and Baltimore was typical. One very important, and precautionary, takeaway for me - Toned Morgans are The Big Thing™ now. I was struck by how many were present, each and every one lovely and strongly arguing of natural process toning. There were so many as to put a kink in the justification for the ludicrous prices they command, arguing that their price is more demand-driven than any relative rarity would justify. It's not that I don't appreciate toners, but my attitude towards them was altered by the sheer quantity I saw. They're not nearly as uncommon - the monsters, I mean - as I'd visualized.
A segue into a couple images belongs here. I struck up a conversation with a gentleman who'd obviously been doing this for many decades. He had a rather cool set in one of his cases - a group of PCGS slab generations, all holding
Peace dollars with most of them being 1922's in MS63. It was just fun to look at.
Another coin he had, posted here for two purposes. "NFS" means "Not For Sale," and to look at this coin in hand you'd understand why. Everything that wasn't field, even the peripheral letters and stars, looked like it had been painted with matte white Rustoleum. There are no adjectival phrases for "frost depth" which would have done it justice. The PL designation was appropriate, not one you would use as a shaving mirror but the fields most certainly did not display "luster;" they were all reflectivity. What's important, though, the lesson to be taken, is what my camera did to the coin. There is absolutely no similarity to the frost shown in the image, and the actual coin. You would argue they were not the same coin. That is a very important takeaway when evaluating coins put forth here on the forum as "frosty." The camera "sees" contrasts which escape the naked eye, and deceives as a result. To the eye, those "black" areas on the cheek simply
were not there. I would have given the guy whatever he asked for the coin.
This last one is presented just for giggle factor. Yes, it's high AU and yes, it's PL. And yes, it's an 1884-S. Forgive my smartphone; it couldn't believe what it was seeing either.
Gold: Of all the superlatives I could apply to this bourse, the one area which most stands out was the vastness of Gold Type present. I've never seen anything like it, and don't know how to describe what I saw. There must have been a few thousand pieces in the room. I'm dead serious. Ever seen the stacks of Morgans at a show? I saw stacked Type Gold. Doug Winter was there; he only had about fifteen coins displayed but every single one was
vicious. If you know Doug, you know what I mean.
I saw Top Pop gold whose dates started with 17, and large numbers of affordable examples of every single US gold issue. I did a mental checklist of all the issues in my mind, and covered them all in the first quarter of the bourse. And I started on the Ancient/World side.... There weren't so many of the very earliest mintages, but that's because there aren't many. I had a momentary vision that there was as much gold in the room as any show packed with bullion dealers, except this time it was all Type. Amazing.
All in all, it was as quality a presentation of
US coinage as any show I've attended, and I've been to WfM and FUN.
Ancients: I'm not well-versed in this discipline, so my impressions are those of an outsider looking in and therefore no estimation of "breadth" is possible. I_will_say that if you had a random number of dollars in your pocket ranging from 50 Cents to $5,000, there was a coin for you. I was particularly struck by the "couple/few hundred bucks" category, and kind of amazed at the quality of the coins available in it. Something about a high AU/Mint State coin which was struck
two thousand years ago, which you could own for the cost of a DMPL Morgan, is compelling beyond words. The area was about equally divided between raw and slabbed, favoring the raw. The experience reinforced my impression that Ancients as a concentration offer variety exceeding that of all other numismatic niches put together. Honestly, as a result I'm rather glad I've avoided them thus far. It'd be a numismatic overdose.
World: The bourse reflected the state of the collector demographic. OFEC types were in enormous abundance; even the US-concentrated dealers on the left side of the room had 2x2 boxes to sort through. For those experienced in coin shows, it's telling that I suspect there were more 2x2 boxes of World issues in the room than Lincoln Cents. The selection of higher-end World stuff was somewhat smaller and concentrated on the areas enjoying strong collector support - Thalers, Great Britain and Europe, and the fast-growing category of Chinese coinage. That latter is undoubtedly due to the expansion of the Chinese middle class over the last few years, and I note a visible upward trend in the representation of Chinese coinage over the last five years I've been paying attention to it.
As for me personally, being somewhat concentrated on Victorian copper and particularly Canadian, I honestly found the weakest presentations in the room. I noted a greater number of Canadian issues (copper and silver) held by random dealers, but very few nice Mint State offerings and those primarily concentrated on Canadian Dollars. I did not see twenty Mint State Canada Large Cents, and what there was, was overpriced even figuring negotiation with few exceptions. Even Great Britain wasn't well-represented at the Mint State level, and the assortment of Conders I saw was much smaller than the Spring show. What there was, was higher-end slabbed almost exclusively from Great Britain itself; Scotland, Ireland and Wales were virtually absent. I did not see a single Anglesey Druid (my own concentration), although in fairness I was not actively engaging those who did have Conders in their cases to see what they had in reserve. It figures, the only disappointment was what I came there for.
It was, however, encouraging to see that more dealers are branching out into World issues. Of the three pieces which came home with me, two were Canada Large Cents from a US-centric dealer who had two cases and half a dozen 2x2 boxes of World at his table. It bodes well.
As a generality, this was the third-best show I've ever attended, behind only the WfM and FUN shows I reached. It really held up to the size and potential of the Whitman Baltimore shows, for the first time in my opinion. I suspect this is as much due to the state of the economy as anything else; precious metal prices are relatively depressed, yet people seem to feel they have money to spend. My impression was that this was
a show for collectors. It honestly felt good to be there, and encouraging for the general health of the hobby.
Posted 11/11/2017 5:18 pm
