So-called dollar and medal collectors' dream/nightmare lot

jonathanb · April 23, 2006 5:02AM

Folks who remember some of my other purchases may recall that I like buying large lots. Well, this counts.

This isn't a rip, but I'm still hoping to do ok. The problem is that while I know the seller is honest, their photo skills also, um, "leave something to be desired", as you'll see.

This is group of Exposition-related medals and related stuff. The reported breakdown of counts of items from different expositions are as follows:

1851 Crystal Palace, London - 18
1862 International Exhibition, London - 11
1876 US Centennial - 60
1878 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 1
1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 1
1898 Trans-Mississippi - 25
1900 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 14
1901 Pan-American - 77
1905 Exposition Universelle, Belgium - 3
1907 Jamestown - 21
1909 Hudson-Fulton - 37
1909 Alaska-Yukon - 10
1915 Panama-Pacific - 33
1926 US Sesquicentennial - 28
1936 Great Lakes - 6
1936 Texas Centennial - 2
1939 Golden Gate - 35

And believe it or not, here are the only pictures I had to work with:

I asked for better pictures/descriptions, and they couldn't provide any. At least everyone was on a level playing field, but still. The funny thing is, I think I can identify at least a couple of dozen pieces even from those photos. If I'm right, there's some really nice stuff there.

I don't have them yet, and I probably won't have them until next week at the soonest. As long as I don't know the answers myself, does anyone else want to take a stab at attributing any of the pieces in this lot? FWIW, I'll point out two other details: not all of the pieces are pictured "right side up", and I'm pretty sure that not all of the pieces are really from the exhibitions listed.

Guesses welcomed. I will update with real pictures when I receive the pieces.

[Also, if anyone knows where I can find pricing info for some of the "other stuff" (especially the pinbacks), I'd love to hear it.]

jonathan

DUIGUY · April 23, 2006 5:22AM

Very nice score !! YOU SUCK !!

cladking · April 23, 2006 5:30AM

The Pan Am collection is world class as is Hudson-Fulton, I suspect. The Trans Mississippi must
be a wonder as well. Don't be surprised if this goes for a very large amount of money. I'd guess
a minimum of $4,000 unless no one finds it and with a little publicity, much more.

StrikeOutXXX · April 23, 2006 8:07AM

Wow, look slike a nice collection, you're right, quite hard to see, but I think I can match up a few.

jonathanb · April 23, 2006 10:01AM

Wow, StrikeOutXXX, I think you've got those matched up pretty well. I didn't get any of those, except for the frying pans in a general sense. Are the legible pictures from your collection, or is there another reference book/site that I should be looking at?

cladking: you have your tenses wrong -- the sale is done. I make plenty of mistakes, but I know better than to post about a lot that I'm interested in before it closes!

Yes, this sold for more than $4000. FWIW, I figured that these items have got to be worth an average of $10/apiece, given how many I can identify as being worth $50+ and $100+. At $10/apiece, that's $3820 right there. At least, I sure hope that it's worth that much!

Anyone else like to take a stab at identifying some of these?

jonathan

DickyBetz · April 23, 2006 10:04AM

I have no idea what any of them are, but I bet it will be really fun to go through them when they come.

ldhair · April 23, 2006 10:13AM

Wow.
Now that's a cool find.

StrikeOutXXX · April 23, 2006 10:27AM

I found an elongated penny from the 1901 Pan-American Exposition metal detecting a few years ago, and had one site bookmarked from then and just googled a few times. Unless some of my coin-shaped examples of complete corrosion were once the tokens/medals in your collection, I doubt I have any of them, not that I wouldn't like to though. I found a few of the souvenir coins or tokens, but couldn't make heads or tails from the pictures, so tried to stay with the odd-shaped things.

Looks like 9 elongated pennies in there, not 100% sure, but most are around $30-40 from the fairs/expositions.

I found no link that was really great for all things, here are a few that have a little info. Looks like you can buy a "Guide to souvenirs" type thing from nearly each exposition that may help you, but not many webpages were that helpful. I found one of those pictures on eBay.

General Fairs/Expositions page

Pan Pacific Site

Libery Bell Museum

The early London ones

jonathanb · April 23, 2006 11:48AM

I can't believe I missed all four of those sites. Looks like I have a bunch more googling ahead of me. Thanks for the pointers!

jonathan

StrikeOutXXX · April 23, 2006 1:05PM

You got me excited about what you bought now. Here's another:

Googling "expositon pinback", "exposition celluloid" or "expositon souvenir" seemed to get a lot.

morgannut2 · April 23, 2006 1:24PM

Wow-- a new buy of the month! That's a really neat collection

cadmanco · April 30, 2006 7:35AM

Jonathanb:

Quite a "Group" of stuff..... I'd be very anxious to get digging through them too, if they were coming my way....

I have attached some files of the Charbneau medal HK-487.... that I currently have....
I will post pics of ther recent eBay purchase, once it arrives.....
Don't know how this will work here....

jonathanb · April 30, 2006 9:23AM

Candmaco's pics:

The Charbneau dollars are all extremely rare, with mintages of 2500 for the gold HK-488 (1939) and HK-489 (1940), 500 for the silver HK-487, 50 for the copper HK-490, and 2 for the platinum HK-1033 -- and that's before "the bulk of the issue was melted down." These are all gold dollar sided medals, about 1/2 inch in diameter. The photographs in the HK book are lousy. Cadmanco was sharp enough to notice an unattributed one that he snagged on eBay yesterday (a different one than this one). Thanks for the pics!

If you look at the pics for my lot, after a while you might notice that there aren't enough of them. There should be 382 items based on the text description, but I can't count more than about 330 in the pics. I think there's an entire tray unpictured, and I think it's the tray with the pieces from the Golden Gate expo. Wouldn't it be cool to find one of the Charbneau dollars there?

Still waiting for my lot to arrive. Maybe late this week, but next week is more likely. Patience isn't one of my strong suits...

jonathan

Shamika · April 30, 2006 9:49AM

jonathanb, how much did you pay?

StrikeOutXXX, pretty good detective work.

MrSpud · April 30, 2006 9:51AM

Wow, looks like a lot of interesting stuff there! Let me know if you want to get rid of any of the Crystal Palave/Great Exhibition of London of 1851 medals, MrsSpud collects those.

jonathanb · April 30, 2006 1:57PM

Shamika, I paid less than I feared, but more than I wanted -- and a lot more than makes my bank account happy.

So, MrSpud, I'll keep you and the Missus in mind, but my first priority after I decide what I'm keeping is to see if I can sell all of the rest together. I've got too much money tied up in this to try to risk being stuck with half of it. I don't know if I can pull it off, selling the rest as a lot, but I owe it to myself to try. I have a couple of people in mind that I can talk to. We'll see what happens.

If I do find a buyer, I'll ask them if they plan on parceling it out, and offer to forward their info to anyone else who expressed interest in a portion. Otherwise, I may be in touch directly. Nothing I can do at all until the package arrives...

(18 pieces theoreticaly from the 1851 London Expo -- what are the chances MrsSpud has all of them?)

jonathan

cladking · April 30, 2006 2:03PM

It's hard to believe you paid very much too much. There are a lot of $30 and $50 medals
in there and probably a lot of even better ones. These would bring a lot of money if each
were sold individually to the highest buyer.

jonathanb · April 30, 2006 2:44PM

There are also some medals that are definitely worth no more than $5 or $10. I think you're right, cladking, that the better medals outweigh the boring ones, but I'll feel better when I have everything inhand so I don't have to keep staring at those silly pictures. Even when I get everything, there's a lot that I know I don't know about, such as the 11 Omaha (?) pinbacks in the one semi-legible picture, And if the unpictured 1939 Golden Gate items consist of 35 of those silly Union Pacific aluminum tokens, that would be a Bad Thing.

I'm guessing I'm going to want to keep about 10% of the pieces, but fortunately not including some of the most expensive ones (I recognize a few of the 1876 medals -- the large medals in the first picture -- as being potentially $200+ apiece). This is a hobby for me, not a business. Even if I could get more money, eventually, by splitting things up, the stress level between now and then is something that I could do without.

If I could find someone who agrees that the medals are worth $30 apiece on average, I'd probably take $20 apiece for 350 of them that I didn't want. That's a 50% profit for the next guy. There was another thread this weekend about whether you'd buy from a dealer that took a 15% markup. I always sort of assume that a dealer is taking a lot more markup than that -- and they're welcome to it in my book, for taking the risk that they're wrong on all of the items they can't sell in the end.

But, everything is academic until the pieces arrive and I can figure out for real what I'm dealing with.

jonathan

cadmanco · May 1, 2006 12:17AM

It appears my "Active-x" is not set up correctly on my computer at home..... Seeing different "editing" capabilites here at work....

Thus, I couldn't figure out how to add my pictures properly......

Thanks, Jonathanb for doing that for me!!

cadmanco · May 1, 2006 12:25AM

Jonathanb:

Lots of nice looking stuff in that lot of yours... My Charbeneau find is nothing compared with that! WOW!! Maybe you'll have the gold and silver Charbeneau? Wouldn't that be a kick. I'm real interested in seeing. Any chance of the NY WF of 1939 for the Palladium dollars (HK-492) of the '39 NY Expo in there? I've seen one of the smaller ones (1/2 ounce) of them, but never a dollar sized (one ounce) piece.

I'm sure you'll keep us all posted here, once your "goodies" arrive... I'll be watching....

jonathanb · May 1, 2006 9:58AM

No, no 1939 NYWF items in this group, unless by accident. There were 300+ additional pieces from that expo, but most of them were non-numismatic pins of various sorts, and almost all of the numismatic items were yellow-colored brass/bronze, so I could rule out the platinum dollar even from the lousy pictures. There were a couple of oval-shaped smudges in the pictures that must have been official medals (HK-491) of the expo, and I wouldn't have minded those but not enough to take everything else just to get them. Oh, well. I hope that group went to someone in NY.

Turns out that there's another Charbneau dollar on eBay right now. Never seen one, now I've seen three. Go figure.

jonathan

MrSpud · May 1, 2006 10:47AM

<< <i>(18 pieces theoreticaly from the 1851 London Expo -- what are the chances MrsSpud has all of them?) >>

Chances would be very low, currently MrsSpud only has 4 of them

. We look forward to hearing from you when you get them, thanks for keeping us in mind.

jonathanb · May 6, 2006 8:31AM

I knew that their tally of items-per-exhibition was a little off, but there were a lot more exhibitions than I could identify from the original pictures. Here's the real tally:

1851 Crystal Palace, London - 17
1853 Great Industrial Exhibition, Dublin - 1
1853 Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations (Crystal Palace), New York - 1
1854 Crystal Palace, Sydenham - 3
1862 International Exhibition, London - 7
1876 US Centennial - 59
1878 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 1
1881 International Cotton Exposition, Atlanta - 1
1885 Worlds Industrial and Cotton Exposition, New Orleans - 4
1885-6 North Central and South American Exposition, New Orleans - 1
1888 Exposicion Universal de Barcelona - 1
1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 3
1895 Cotton States and International Exhibition, Atlanta - 3
1898 Trans-Mississippi - 24
1899 Greater America Exposition, Omaha - 1
1900 Exposition Universelle, Paris - 12
1901 Pan-American - 77
1905 Exposition Universelle, Belgium - 3
1905 Louis & Clark Centennial Exposition, Portland - 4
1907 Jamestown - 23
1909 Hudson-Fulton - 36
1909 Alaska-Yukon - 9
1915 Panama-Pacific - 28
1915 Panama-California - 2
1925 British Empire Exhibition - 1
1926 US Sesquicentennial - 24
1934 World's Fair, Chicago - 1
1936 Great Lakes - 6
1936 Texas Centennial - 2
1939 Golden Gate - 34

Non-expositions
1876 Statue of Liberty - 1
1915-6 Coca Cola - 1
1914 Panama Canal - 2
1926 New Jersey Sesquicentennial - 2

And here are some pictures. These aren't great either, but at least you can identify most of the items. I will be taking better pictures of some of the more interesting pieces and splitting them into separate threads over the next day or two. If there is something that you particular want to see larger, post or send me a PM since I don't plan on posting larger pictures of all 382 items.

Shamika · May 6, 2006 9:08AM

jonathanb,

Any "big-time" scores?

jonathanb · May 7, 2006 4:16AM

No "big-time scores" in terms of dollar value, although there are several individual pieces that should easily be worth $200+ apiece. Of course, that assumes that I know enough to recognize the big scores. There are enough pieces in this group that are outside my expertise that I could have something good and not know it.

So-called dollar and medal collectors' dream/nightmare lot

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