Earthquake in Hamburg Germany, 1620 AD

[gmarguli]

 

A very cool coin I picked up for my collection at the NYINC show a few days ago. It is a 1620 Germany (Hamburg) Taler which has been double struck at about 15* rotated from the first strike. The buildings appear to be falling down.

[harvey8542]

Great and very interesting coin

[physics-fan3.14]

Very cool, and very good condition. Could we get a show report, maybe?

[gmarguli]

Sure, I can do a short show report.

 

The show seemed very well attended. Little room to move around and lots of waiting for a chair at the dealer cases.

 

Sales were strong. Several dealers who had packed cases at the beginning of the show had literally near empty cases at the end of the show. This was clearly a sellers show.

 

All types of coins were moving. I scoped out some nice coins from countries which are usually hard sells (African, Middle Eastern, etc) and figured I'd come back to them if I found nothing else. They were sold by the time I took a second look. These were coins that usually would sit in inventory for long periods of time.

 

The usual suspect "hot" countries were still hot. Nice Russian or Chinese moved at strong prices extremely quick. Poland was on fire. If I had to pick an area where retail sales seemed slow, it would have been ancients.

 

The Chinese counterfeiters are getting amazingly good. I got to see a couple of experts pass judgment on some coins. The experts couldn't agree on whether they were real or counterfeit. If these people can't tell, be afraid, be very afraid!

 

The weak dollar seemed to hurt the US buyers. Lots of foreign buyers at the show. Lots of foreign dealers still looking to move coins toward the end of the show.

 

There were several auctions held in conjunction with the show. I place a couple of bids in various auctions and lost almost all. I considered my bids strong and many were a sizable percentage above the high estimate. I got blown away on many. Embarrassingly blown away on some.

 

On a personal level, I got to meet several forum members for the first time including Dimitri (syracusian), Larry (3Mark), and several other non-forum members / lurkers that I've communicated with over the internet or by phone, but never met before. I also had dinner with Steve (evillageprowler / EVP) and his wife once in NYC and once at his home and got to flip thru part of his collection. For my collection, I got the coin in this thread along with a few other early Talers in nice condition. I'll post pictures of those in the coming weeks.

 

Overall, it was a decent show and the weather in NYC wasn't bad and it didn't rain much.

[Hoot]

That's outstanding! A little nightmare in Hamburg.

 

Hoot

[physics-fan3.14]

Excellent show report, exactly what I was looking for.

[agentjim007]

Hamburg Taler ROCKS!

[pendragon1998]

Beautiful (and interesting) coin - what's the significance of the '32' in the circle on the reverse?

[gmarguli]

The 32 is for '32 Schilling" which was the denomination. 32S = 1 Taler.

[pendragon1998]

oh - makes sense

[the_Thing ®]

That's a cool coin Greg. So a new batch of counterfeits? I guess I've been missing the scoop. Any reading on it around or a condensed mean and angry version? In regards to the ancients market, I know CNG recently had a printed sell with record results reached. But that is really nothing new to them.

[gmarguli]

Yep, new Chinese counterfeits of world coins. From what I could see, most of them looked really good.

 

As for ancients being weak, I only say that because from the beginning to the end of the show, there seemed to be a lot of ancients that didn't move from dealer cases.