The BCD Numismatic Library Sale, and Human Endeavor
January 31, 2024
Coin collecting might seem a very solitary pastime; the coins themselves mere objects. Yet for me its rewards have been not just interior, intellectual (and financial), but also very human in its interactions and relationships.
Forty years ago, I started ancient coin sales. With a xeroxed listing, illustrated by just putting a few coins on the copier. The crappiest images imaginable.
A letter from someone in Greece requested the catalog, making it sound like those few pitiful pictures were somehow important. I thought he must be a weirdo.
But that was “BCD” — he likes to be kind of anonymous — who I eventually learned is in fact the greatest collector ever of ancient Greek coins. Not only collecting them, but building the world’s greatest library devoted to them. Open to other researchers, as a resource for study of every minute variation, thus seeking to include every publication that ever illustrated an ancient Greek coin. Hence his interest in my own humble productions. BCD’s quest left no stone unturned.
He became a regular correspondent, a sometime coin buyer, and I’d often ship him boxfuls of publications I’d acquired.* He even sent me a few coins to sell for him. (I remember a dual portrait bronze of Octavian and Zenodoros, a local potentate in Chalkis, rather uncommon, that fetched a strong price.) When in 1992 I mentioned a forthcoming tourist trip to Greece, he invited us to visit. I recall eagerly sharing this exciting news with my wife — just as she was sharing hers of a positive pregnancy test!
So we got to see the actual BCD library. Tucked away in a building in Athens, it was an impressive full-scale facility, employing a full-time librarian, Pat Felch. (My wife was a professional librarian too.) Then the four of us went out to dinner.
Over the decades, I’ve regularly encountered BCD at the annual New York international coin shows; unfailingly gracious, he’s bought some of my (non-numismatic) books and has even posted comments on my blog.
Now well past eighty, his coins were pretty much all sold over the years, with some major auctions (spread among many different firms) each devoted to just one Greek locale.
The collection was immense; when I visited Classical Numismatic Group in Pennsylvania, a top ancient coin company, I was shown a cabinet taller than me and told it contained all BCD coins. Recognizable by his meticulously hand-written identifying tags — so frequently found with coins of Larissa, in particular, that in my own auctions I’ll sometimes write up a Larissan piece saying “NOT ex-BCD and rare thus!”**
Still it was a shock to see announcement of the BCD Library Sale. By Kolbe & Fanning, the leading numismatic booksellers. I can’t begin to imagine what was involved in transporting this huge library from Athens to Ohio where K&F operates.
I’ve had a long relationship with them too. In their periodic online book sales, I make schnorrer offers for leftovers, and they’ll send me two or three big carefully packed boxes, replenishing my supply of plastic bags and bubble wrap. (So frugal I even salvage the tape.) Meantime, their catalogs are trips down memory lane for me, full of names with personal resonance; so many of them gone.
The BCD catalog duly arrived, explaining that efforts were made to find a permanent new home for the library, by donation, but there were no takers, no institution willing to deal with the logistics and expense of accommodating it. So it’s being sold piecemeal at auction. A sad commentary on our modern world, actually.
I myself have found that with so much numismatic information now available online, demand for physical reference material isn’t what it used to be. But, a saving grace, such items have become collectibles themselves, with antiquarian value.
The 600-lot sale is February 17, just the first of many. (Not yet including what I assume is BCD’s complete run of all 123 Frank S. Robinson ancient coin auctions; likely the only such in existence, as my own file somehow lacks one or two.) Here’s the link: https://bid.numislit.com/
Perusing auction catalogs can give me an odd unsettling feeling. Seeing what huge effort some passionate collector had devoted to assembling his holdings. Now they’re being dispersed, a testament to how ephemeral such human endeavor so often is.
Applicable in my own case; for instance I’ve carefully preserved the hardbound 2013 German auction catalog with my name on the cover, selling my collection of Chinese cast cash. I loved building that collection, was very proud of the achievement, and it would be extremely hard to replicate today. Yet it’s like dropping a cupful of water in the ocean. A decade later, who cares? Who will care in a century? A millennium?
And so the closing words in one of the BCD catalog’s prefaces, penned by Dr. Alan Walker (another inimitable numismatic personage I’ve long known):
“My name is BCD, Greatest of Collectors: look upon my works ye mighty and despair! The empty trays and bare shelves stretch far away.”
* * *
* There was a cheap seamail rate. Today it’s prohibitively expensive.
** When I googled for a picture of a BCD tag for use here, I found several. And a tag from Nick Economopoulos, one of my favorite coin dealers, citing a BCD provenance — which also had my own handwriting on it!