Publishers Message (July 2021 Greysheet)

The Summer of 2021 has finally arrived, and not a moment too soon. This year July ushers in a major, and welcome, milestone in the timeline of the pandemic: the first national coin show! Typically the Summer FUN show is wedged between a busy series of Spring coins shows and the ANA World’s Fair of Money. This year is anything but typical and the Summer FUN is the first national event since February 2020 and everyone is chomping at the bit to get to Orlando. I know the CDN customer service team, led by Billie Blattel is looking forward to attending and seeing the faces of all the wonderful dealers and subscribers we’ve missed over the past 16 months. If you come to the July 8-10 show, please stop by and say hello.

Fast on the heels of the FUN show will be the World’s Fair of Money, another highly-anticipated event which could well be one of the most exciting ANA’s in a decade or two. Again, a show that usually finds attendees in an exhausted state from six months of travel, is now uniquely in the prime of the trading year. I can’t wait!

The FAROUK-WEITZMAN 1933 Saint-Gaudens

As deadlines would have it, I am writing this article on the eve of the Sotheby’s auction of the Farouk-Weitzman 1933 Saint-Gaudens. The community has a lot of mixed emotions about this coin. In one camp you have folks that feel the 1933 Saint is a disgraced coin with an infamous legacy. It’s status as a unique-in-private-hands item give pause for true excitement. I am not one of those people. Personally, I love the story of this coin and, if I could afford it, I would be the high bidder. How can an average-quality Van Gogh be more valuable than the most-storied United States coin, gold or otherwise? It shouldn’t. The buyer of this coin holds one of the all-time greatest pieces of American numismatics. It has so much going for it. It’s a beautiful, frosty, original gem, and it’s a large gold coin. I don’t care what anyone says, she’s the queen of the prom in my book, and I hope the price realized is astronomical. Regardless, we will post that price as Greysheet bid as soon as we verify the result, as we typically do on major rarities.

THE BANKNOTE BOOK

In some of the most exciting news to announce in a long time, at least from our perspective, CDN has acquired the well-known world paper money resource The Banknote Book (BNB). This monumental and leading-edge catalog has been built for the last ten years by Owen Linzmayer and a legion of dedicated contributors. The scope of the project is to catalog all known world paper money types and varieties, including Specimens, Proofs, and Color Trials. For those not familiar with the evolution of world paper money cataloging, it more or less began just over 40 years ago when German numismatist Albert Pick’s worldwide catalog was published in English by Krause Publishing. This work built upon prior German-language catalogs Pick had already written. While others produced or attempted to produce catalogs, the “Pick” book became the standard. The official title of the work, as it still is today, is the Standard Catalog of World Paper Money (SCWPM). This is also why every note cataloged has a “P” prefix with its catalog number. Into the late 1990s, the collecting of world paper money exploded in both popularity and value, thanks primarily to the internet and auction sites like eBay.

I admit that I am not an expert in world paper money, which is one reason I love The Banknote Book so much. There is simply nothing like it for world paper. As a fan of rare coins, you would be wise to have a look at the exciting and fast-growing specialty of world paper. The values are tremendous in comparison to U.S. coinage and you’ll find a virtually unlimited landscape of potential for your business, or collection.

Sincerely,
John Feigenbaum
john@greysheet.com