Would it ever make economic sense for an auction company to produce a "greatest hits" cata

Longacre

Let me explain what I was thinking, and let's take Heritage as an example (because they are the biggest and baddest auction firm). Suppose that Heritage has 15 sales in a year, and each of those sales contains auctions of $20 Saints. Would it make economic sense for Heritage to produce an annual catalog each year, solely with the auction descriptions, pictures, etc. of the $20 Saints that were sold in that year? Or maybe it can be a bi-annual catalog. Maybe this idea makes sense for the "popular series", such as Saints or large cents. I am not sure if the idea would work for lesser collected series, like silver trimes. For those who have a good idea of catalog production, how hard would it be to generate a catalog such as this? I assume that usually the catalogs are produced using some sort of computer program, so it might be easy to cut and paste the pages from a particular coin series into one catalog. Also, perhaps it is possible to code the regular catalogs in a way such that a "Saint annual catalog" can be formatted for printing just by pressing a button. Lastly, in order for this to work, I would guess that Heritage would need to accept pre-orders for the special catalogs, and there would need to be enough of a demand for them for it to make economic sense. What do you think?

Julian

With the internet sites being so powerful, in Heritage's case, I cannot imagine that someone would be willing to pay for an annual catalogue of Saint's, for instance.

I just don't think that it can make economic sense.

messydesk

I could see an endless variety of "boutique" catalogs that they'd have to produce. What might make more sense is a "catalog by query," where someone can make a query online (all $20 Saints sold between Jan 2004 and Dec 2005, all coins dated 1873, all coins once owned by Pittman, etc.), which would create a report in the format of one of their catalogs, with or without pictures (customer's choice). This report could be sent to an online publisher such as lulu.com for printing, then shipped from there to the customer. The cost would be the third party printing and shipping costs plus a royalty to the auction company. The cost to Heritage would be fixed, regardless of how many different types of catalogs were ordered.

RYK

With the search function on Heritage's site (and ANR now, too), most of the important auction coin transactions for me can be recalled with a few keystrokes. I do not think it makes sense for the auction cos to publish a separate print edition. Frankly, I do not think it makes much sense for Whitman to publish the auction records over the last five years annually as they do.