Tanenbaum Civil War Token Collection Sold
Broadstruck
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From the press release...
One of the finest and most complete collections of Civil War Store Cards and Patriotic tokens ever to come to market has been purchased jointly by Q. David Bowers and Steve Hayden. The collection of nearly 5,000 tokens was carefully assembled over many decades by Steve Tanenbaum, noted token and medal dealer, collector and researcher. The vast majority of the tokens are in Mint State.
Until his untimely passing last year Steve was the epicenter of research on this specialty. He had a wealth of knowledge on history, die varieties, rarity, and other aspects and worked closely with the Civil War Token Society. In addition, for many years he was a partner in Rossa & Tanenbaum, token and medal specialists, until Rich Rossa retired. In later years he worked with Steve Hayden.
Approximately half the collection has already been professionally certified including countless numbers of finest known and finest graded examples, and others will be certified in coming months. By arrangement with the estate, the collection was divided and sold separately with Steve Hayden handling the Patriotic, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin portions and Dave Bowers handling the Ohio, New York, Illinois and Tennessee portions. The transaction was in excess of a million dollars for each of the parties.
One of the finest and most complete collections of Civil War Store Cards and Patriotic tokens ever to come to market has been purchased jointly by Q. David Bowers and Steve Hayden. The collection of nearly 5,000 tokens was carefully assembled over many decades by Steve Tanenbaum, noted token and medal dealer, collector and researcher. The vast majority of the tokens are in Mint State.
Until his untimely passing last year Steve was the epicenter of research on this specialty. He had a wealth of knowledge on history, die varieties, rarity, and other aspects and worked closely with the Civil War Token Society. In addition, for many years he was a partner in Rossa & Tanenbaum, token and medal specialists, until Rich Rossa retired. In later years he worked with Steve Hayden.
Approximately half the collection has already been professionally certified including countless numbers of finest known and finest graded examples, and others will be certified in coming months. By arrangement with the estate, the collection was divided and sold separately with Steve Hayden handling the Patriotic, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin portions and Dave Bowers handling the Ohio, New York, Illinois and Tennessee portions. The transaction was in excess of a million dollars for each of the parties.
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3
Comments
<< <i>No price discussed? >>
"The transaction was in excess of a million dollars for each of the parties."
-Paul
<< <i>
<< <i>No price discussed? >>
"The transaction was in excess of a million dollars for each of the parties."
-Paul >>
That is a lot of Civil War Tokens!
<< <i>Can a book be far behind? Congrats to QDB & Steve. >>
It was mentioned that QDB is studying his portions prior to selling them.
a massive new book manuscript at the time of his passing.
Steve certainly had a lot great material. He had an outstanding set of sutler tokens that has been in the process of being sold over the past year.
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<< <i>Yes, it is a fantastic collection. I have had the pleasure (with and without Steve) of selling many important collections over the years including Charles Urquart, Larkin Wilson, James Holtel, Ed Rosen, Henry South, Bryon Kanzinger and more recently Steve Tanenbaum's Civil War Sutler token collection. But Steve's Patriotic and Store Cards surpasses them all. Even my portion at just under 50% is a site to behold. I was looking through the Indiana today working on Want Lists and the quality is just amazing. Dave Bowers plans will provide some additional information in upcoming issues of Coin World and The Civil War Token Society Journal, so stay tuned. Steve http://civilwartokens.com/auction >>
Hey Steve!
Welcome aboard! Awesome to hear you got to handle at least a strong portion of this great collection. Talk to you soon.
<< <i>Yes, it is a fantastic collection. I have had the pleasure (with and without Steve) of selling many important collections over the years including Charles Urquart, Larkin Wilson, James Holtel, Ed Rosen, Henry South, Bryon Kanzinger and more recently Steve Tanenbaum's Civil War Sutler token collection. But Steve's Patriotic and Store Cards surpasses them all.[/L] >>
I'll vouch for that. The collection contains a number of patriotic tokens I have never seen for sale in the 23 years I've been collecting this series.
<< <i>Steve T. and the Civil War Token Society were working on
a massive new book manuscript at the time of his passing.
>>
Any chance this will be completed? It would be cool if his collection was plated in the book in color before being broken up. I would buck up a few hundred to purchase this book
<< <i>
<< <i>Steve T. and the Civil War Token Society were working on
a massive new book manuscript at the time of his passing.
>>
Any chance this will be completed? It would be cool if his collection was plated in the book in color before being broken up. I would buck up a few hundred to purchase this book >>
Likewise. Sounds like a very necessary undertaking for the greater good of the numismatic community
Old Thread Bump
Just ran across this thread looking for a well known pedigree.
Pretty amazing that Civil War Token collections can get up to 5K varieties!
I have a few from Tanenbaum in my Hometown set. Wish I was collecting them when this collection came to market.
Latin American Collection
I have rarely collected anything in the off medals, including presidential campaign tokens. I have concentrated on the slogans and die varieties. A lot of the off-metal pieces were “vanity tokens” that were to sell back in the day, not for the initial purpose. That’s one of main reasons why they have never interested me.
If you don’t collect the off-metals, that will put a big limit on how many varieties you can accumulate.
Hard to believe this was 8 years ago already. Such an opportunity at the time to add to one's collection. Some things I purchased back then, I've never again seen for sale.
$2 million dollar collection of civil war tokens!
Dead Cat Waltz Exonumia
"Coin collecting for outcasts..."
Here are some presidential campaign tokens I bought a while back. Since this is a old post and I am not seeing any pictures thought I would post these. There was a poster that mentioned these came from Europe but don’t have much time to research. However I really like these ones as not your normal type.
Gluggo,
I am pretty sure that those campaign tokens were designed/engraved by Auguste Brichaut. He was a medalist who was at the Paris mint in the 19th century. The abbreviation 'Dir.' implies that he supervised the production.
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Given dates on them, I would say that they are post campaign pieces. The dates mark the years those men took office, not the years they were running.
Tyler took office in April 1841, a month after William Henry Harrison. Harrison died after only a month in office. Before then, there was no thought that Tyler would become president.
Thank you for that information I just did a search on Auguste Brichaut. I found this link/post now I am going to have to do some research . It’s called Dick Johnston Data Base. Very informative. Thank you much.
http://www.medalartists.com/brichaut-auguste.html
I purchased this Frederick Behr (saloon, bowling) Detroit CW Store Card Token from dealer Steve Hayden after Steve Tanenbaum had passed away. The token I purchased is from Tanenbaum's personal CWT collection, said to be the best example he could acquire in over 40 years of collecting. It was one of the two Detroit CWTs I needed at the time to complete my set of every merchant who issued a Detroit CWT. The Behr Store Card is rated R-8, which means 5-10 examples known. It is the plate coin (see photo taken from the new Third Edition of U.S. Civil War Store Cards by George and Melvin Fuld, edited by John Ostendorf).
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The other token needed to complete my Detroit set was the R-9 (two known) Seth Smith piece. This is also the plate coin in the new edition of the Fuld book. It had been in the Temple Collection of all Michigan Store Cards since 1933 and is the finest by far of the two known examples. Steve Tanenbaum attempted multiple times to buy the Temple Michigan Store Card Collection but was unsuccessful. I have Temple's records including the original copies of three letters send by Tanenbaum to John Temple, son of Cliff Temple (the original collector - the collection went to Cliff's son John after his death).
My great-great grandfather issued two Detroit Store Cards, one for the Perkins Hotel, and the other was W. Perkins, Jr. Grocer & Provision Dealer.
W. David Perkins Numismatics - http://www.davidperkinsrarecoins.com/ - 25+ Years ANA, ANS, NLG, NBS, LM JRCS, LSCC, EAC, TAMS, LM CWTS, CSNS, FUN
The Presidential Names set was struck in 1878 as an independent commemorative set and have nothing to do with Presidential campaigns. Presidents from George Washington to Rutherford Hayes were honored in the set which was struck in copper but many of the pieces I've seen and handled have toned in very different manners from each other. It is noted that "very few sets were struck". I believe that I posted info when you pictured them before.
I wonder how easy it would be to identify the majority of tokens in Tanenbaum’s collection. A lot of the Bowers Reference Collection tokens are from Tanenbaum but not identified as such in a centralized way that I’ve seen.
When I was a young child maybe 5-10 years old, my next door neighbor had a token collection that was said to have contained 40,000 different tokens of all types. One of my great regrets is that I had no knowledge or interest in such things, and the idea that there could be 40,000 different ones likely would have scared me off anyway.
Right. It would’ve been very easy. And since you brought it up I’ll just say, even at the risk of forum criticism, that this has always rubbed me wrong — Steve spent decades doing the hard work and then QDB buys his tokens and takes all the credit by calling them his “reference collection,” implying he did the work. It is very disingenuous — and disrespectful to Steve as far as I’m concerned. The slabs housing Tanenbaum tokens should say “Tananbaum-Bowers Collection” or something of the like. If there is more to the story I’d like to hear it.
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It goes back a bit further too as Rossa and Tanenbaum were partners and it seems Tanenbaum acquired Rossa's collection. Here's an example I have which is from Rossa to Tanenbaum to Bowers but on the slab it only indicates Bowers. Ideally it should say "Rossa-Tanenbaum-Bowers". Is there any listing or other way to identify this as a Rich Rossa token?
That being said, it seems easy to lose provenances. For example, even though these have a Bowers insert, they aren't listed with the Bowers pedigree (or any pedigree) in PCGS cert verification. Additionally, the recent Pogue coins have a Pogue insert but he's also not mentioned in the PCGS cert verification pedigree. Some kind of listing of these would be nice.
I created a Q&A thread here but have gotten no responses so far:
https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/1034880/how-to-get-pedigrees-reattached#latest
Here's a longer article from CoinWorld for the original sale:
https://www.coinworld.com/news/precious-metals/tanenbaum-civil-war-token-collection-sells.html
You’re absolutely right. As for the reason why it doesn’t the only thing that makes sense is hubris.
It shouldn’t be. Simply be a real champion of numismatic history and give credit where credit is due.
ANA LM
USAF Retired — 34 years of active military service! 🇺🇸