READERS REMEMBER MICHEL PRIEUR

I met Michel Prieur on my first visit to Paris in 1983. He was the manager of perhaps the shabbiest, messiest shop in the Bourse area where all the dealers in Paris are congregated. I did a little business as he had a considerable stock of bank notes. Only a few years passed before his family, I believe, purchased the business and began the transformation of it into one of the greatest numismatic firms in France.

Over the years they changed the shop on the bourse into a beautiful modern emporium for all things numismatic. They also purchased other locations down the street and turned them into further office space for their expanding enterprises.

As the internet age emerged they built a website, which I consider, should be a model for anyone who is in the numismatic trade. Michel was knowledgeable in many areas of numismatics and handled many great paper money collections in the French and French Colonial area.

He regularly came to the Maastricht Paper Money show in the early days and in the 80's and 90's I regularly visited him at the shop in Paris. Michel could be difficult, but was always fair and most professional in his business pursuits. France and the numismatic community at large has lost a giant. May he rest in peace!

He became known worldwide through his extensive website cgb.fr which was of such an importance to him that he changed the name of his company from Compagnie Générale de Bourse to cgb.fr. Michel Prieur was a pioneer of the internet who understood its implications at an early stage. In particular, borders between countries lost their meaning and this has changed the French coin market being a kind of isolated before deeply. Michel loved his internet site. February 26 this year he wrote to CoinsWeekly how proud he was of his website being not only available in French, English, Italian and German but also in Russian and Chinese. He raved of the funny look of his website featuring all these Chinese and Cyrillic characters.

Today, his website features some 350,000 pages with a shop, e-auctions, a comprehensive archive and a blog. Monthly the digital Bulletin numismatique offers news from the numismatic world. Currently cgb.fr employs 25 people who feel deeply obliged to their patron and his commitment to numismatics.

Michel Prieur was a great author. With the corpus of Syrian-Phoenician tetradrachms – written together with Karin Prieur – he has given us a reference book that will be quoted over the next decades in the auction catalogues. He developed the concept of ‘Le Franc’, a catalogue that can compete with the American ‘Red Books’ as for abundance of information. In 2014 the 10th edition of ‘Le Franc’ was published.

To read the complete article, see: Michel Prieur (1955-2014) (www.coinsweekly.com/en/News/4?&id=2682)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see: MICHEL PRIEUR 1955-2014 (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v17n12a12.html)

READERS REMEMBER MICHEL PRIEUR

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