The Bavarian Collection

[Victor]

This unassuming Claudius II posthumous coin issued by Constantine I has an interesting story.



ex Numismatic Fine Arts XXXI (March 18, 1993), lot 1300 (part of), Bavarian collection, sale ticket with collector's notes included; purchased from Brueder Egger of Vienna (March 1, 1925) with notated ticket and paper flip





Regarding the Bavarian collection, the following is taken from the 1993 NFA catalog introduction:

"The following 352 lots comprising nearly 3,500 coins represent a single collection, formed in Germany between c. 1890 and c. 1930.  Incredibly, this vast assemblage has remained essentially undisturbed during the last half century, each piece still in its original envelope and accompanied by its original ticket.  Though most of the coins cost no more than a mark or two at the time, it is obvious that meticulous care was taken in compiling and maintaining a well-organized collection.  Most tickets contain detailed numismatic information and often include the date and place of purchase as well as what appear to be several collector's personal codes.  In many instances our collector's handwritten envelopes and tickets are supplemented by those of his purchase sources.  Tickets imprinted with the names of venerable dealers -- Adolph Hess, A. Reichmann, Eugen Merzbacher, Brueder Egger, and others -- conjure up images of the bustling numismatic trade in Central Europe before the Second Word War.

The coins themselves are for the most part Roman Imperial, yet there is also a wide array of Greek, Greek Imperial, and Byzantine.  From the contents of the collection it would appear that our collector's primary area of interest was Roman billon and bronze of the third to mid-fourth centuries.  He also had a fondness for the billon coinage of Roman Egypt, as evidenced by the number of Alexandrian tetradrachms he acquired. ...

A certain sadness tinges our efforts at dispersing this remarkable collection.  For in the present era, it seems a greater marvel for a large collection to have survived so completely intact for sixty years than for a coin to survive in its mint state for over two millennia."


In an article originally published in The Celator, January 1994 by Victor Failmezger who in addition to the Bavarian Collection coins he won himself at the NFA sale also studied the tickets of many others.  He discovered that the collector's tickets were often cut up business cards of Michael Kastl, a dealer of military regalia in Munich allowing him to wonder whether Herr Kastl may have been the collector himself.