At the ANA show last week, Ron Guth gave me a heads' up about his upcoming article for CoinWeek on collector John J. Pittman's famous Statue of Liberty bidding strategy. Here's an excerpt, but be sure to read the complete article online.
-Editor
Once upon a time, long before the COVID pandemic, and well before the internet took much of the business online, rare coin auctions were exciting events held in crowded rooms. Bidding was active, sometimes feverish, and members of the audience scanned the room and craned their necks to see who was bidding on special coins. To combat this unwanted scrutiny, bidders who wished to hide their activity relied on subtle moves that a good auctioneer would catch but which other bidders might not. After all, being too obvious could leave the bidder susceptible to competitors who might run up the price by bidding against them. In some cases, bidders arranged special signals with the auctioneer prior to the sale, including such subtle movements as a flick of a pen or the lifting of an eyebrow. Bidders routinely used small moves to obtain big coins as inexpensively as possible.
Yet for every rule, there's an exception.
In the case of a very special coin, the rule-breaker was John Jay Pittman, who used a very big move to obtain a very small coin – a Proof 1854 Type Two Gold Dollar.
JJP's big move, as mentioned above, came in 1956, when he participated in Abe Kosoff's sale of the Thomas Melish collection. The small Proof 1854 Type II Gold Dollar that JJP stalked measured a diminutive 14.3 millimeters in diameter, but it was an extreme rarity and one of only a few examples known (the roster of four known Proofs is listed at the end of this article). The unusual technique used by JJP to obtain the Proof 1854 Gold Dollar is legendary and was the extreme opposite of the secretive bidding tactics used by other bidders at the time.
Dave Akers recounted the story under Lot 864 in his October 1997 sale catalog of the Pittman Collection, Part I:
As the lot was called, [JJP] walked to the front of the Florentine Room in the Claypool Hotel where the sale was taking place, turned and faced the crowd, his back to the auctioneer, and held up his arm to bid until the gavel was struck awarding him the lot at $525. During the bidding process, he intently stared at anyone who ‘dared' to bid against him. He stayed by the podium and repeated the procedure for the next lot … and several subsequent lots … He never wavered and never dropped his arm until he was recognized as the winning bidder in each instance. His actions earned him the nickname ‘The Statue of Liberty'.
To read the complete article, see:
A Big Move for a Small Coin: The Legend of John Jay Pittman's Statue of Liberty Bidding Strategy
(https://coinweek.com/us-coins/a-big-move-for-a-small-coin-the-legend-of-john-jay-pittmans-statue-of-liberty-bidding-strategy/)
Wayne Homren, Editor
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