MORE ON MARTIN GENGERKE

Anthony Terranova of New York City writes:

I met Martin Gengerke when I started working for Stack’s as a cataloguer in 1991 (I think). Martin’s desk was upstairs in the Coin Galleries suite in a small passway between the shipping department and the classical numismatics cataloguer’s desk (Jan Blamberg). Martin sat facing one wall while opposite him George Cuhaj sat facing the other. It was always tight for space in there.

Martin was Stack’s computer maven. He had brought the firm into modern times by introducing into its cataloguing methods the software then being used by the NY Times. This was a word processing program named XyWrite III+ that ran on DOS (I think the flavour was MS-DOS). It was entirely keyboard driven requiring memorization of Control and Alt key combinations and the use of other unintuitive commands to indicate bold or Italic text. Martin loved the software; he once told me he thought a mouse was a lazy man’s input device.

Stack’s cataloguing procedure at the time I started there was a combination of the traditional 1940’s-50’s method with hints of the technology to come that would revolutionize the whole thing. Descriptions were written by hand on the face of No.6 envelopes along with the consignor’s identification letter and a note of what sale the lot was to go into. The coin or medal, itself, was enclosed in the envelope to allow for later grade and attribution checks as needed. White envelopes were used for regular Stack’s floor bid sales, green ones for Coin Galleries’ mail bid sales. Martin and George transcribed the handwritten descriptions into XyWrite III+ and saved their work onto floppies at the end of the day. Martin’s job at cataloguing deadline was to arrange all the descriptions into agreed on sale order, control fonts and type sizes, and oversee the transfer of files from XyWrite III+ into the format used by the firm that printed and bound Stack’s catalogues.

When I knew him, Martin seemed a very private person. His knowledge of fractional currency seemed formidable to me. His catalogue of American auction catalogues was one of the handful of reference works I always used in my work. A cryptic note on a consignor’s inventory like “Bt. at sale 5/81” would lead first to Martin’s list to see if an auction had taken place that month and then to identify the sale and company, then a visit to Stack’s comprehensive library to hunt down that sale catalogue, then to possible candidates for an identification and if I was lucky, a precise description or a plate of the coin to seal the provenance. I’ve sold or given away most of my numismatic library but I’ve hung onto my bound copy of Martin’s American Numismatic Auctions for old time’s sake.

Mike Hodder
December, 2020

I knew Martin professionally primarily as one of the pioneers in maintaining a census of U. S. large size currency. I was aware that he had assembled and sold a world class collection of U. S. fractional currency. His ownership pedigrees on items in that collection will greatly outlive him, but in my opinion his census work ultimately will define his numismatic legacy.

He recorded all classes of large size U. S. currency and was well advanced when I became aware of him in the 1970s. I don’t know what motivated him along this line, but it certainly made sense for someone working in the numismatic auction business because a census defines rarity, reveals available grades, and, for lore, records pedigrees. Martin compiled all these statistics and paid close attention to pedigrees. He enjoyed ferreting out first appearances of classic items in early major collections or sales, and he tracked items through successive appearances.

Working for Stacks gave him access to significant holdings of key material, which was a major competitive advantage for him. However, Martin did not confine his quest to the numismatic market. He made a major effort to catalog institutional holdings including museums, libraries, governmental agencies, and commercial banks. He realized institutional holdings were where many major rarities were to be found. He got access to and painstakingly recorded the holdings of Federal Reserve Banks, various Treasury agencies, and the Smithsonian Institution.

In the course of this work, he helped uncover unrecorded issues and previously unrecognized varieties. He partnered with noted Federal paper researcher Doug Murray in this effort and together they materially added to listings in the Friedberg catalog. The numbering system in the Friedberg catalog runs chronologically through the various classes of currency, so a new discovery of say a Treasury signature combination or design variety requires insertion, which involves adding a letter suffix to the existing number representing the previously recorded item in the list such as Fr.1166c. Many of the items listed in the Friedberg catalog followed by such a letter are the result of the Gengerke/Murray collaboration.

To maintain a census, one must record everything. Martin digested auction catalogs as fast as they came along, a tedious, time-consuming task that grew burdensome and eventually overwhelming with the explosive growth of paper money collecting and sales in the last three decades of the 20th century. Eventually, he saw the writing on the wall and sought to divest himself of the particularly onerous burden of national bank notes so he could focus on the other Federal large size issues. Around the turn of the century, he negotiated the transfer of his large size national bank note census to Don Kelly, who by then had taken on the John Hickman census and thus had a national bank note census that was eclipsing Martins. Martin’s additions to the Hickman-Kelly census materially expanded the whole and that whole now comprises the core of the National Currency Census operated by Andrew Shiva of well over half a million notes.

Martin continued to build his census of large size Federal currency but the time demands and his declining health took a toll on his ability to keep up with the onslaught of new material. He distributed the census on a crammed CD that he offered at a nominal price to both people in the trade and collectors. I can tell you that no one makes money on such a venture. When my own research expanded into non-national Federal currency after the turn of the century, Martin generously and without solicitation provided updates. The last update I received is dated 2014, which listed just under 150,000 entries. By then his health was such that it was among the last copies he distributed. It remains the benchmark census because no one has comprehensively compiled such census data for all the Federal issues since. Of course, people track the big-ticket items and new discoveries, but the vast pool of 2nd tier material simply is not getting the attention he gave to it. Regardless, his census did define rarity and that larger perspective remains valid.

It is my opinion that Martin’s enduring legacy in numismatics was his role in compiling his census and his devotion to tracing pedigrees during the 20th century. His monetary reward was nil for this activity, it was a true labor of love.

Peter Huntoon
December 2020

Dave Hirt writes:

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
MARTIN GENGERKE (1947-2020) (https://www.coinbooks.org/v23/esylum_v23n51a09.html)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web