DAVISSONS E-AUCTION 50

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V27 2024 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 27, Number 43, October 27, 2024, Article 23

Davissons is holding their E-Auction 50 on October 30th. Here's a preview of the sale's British Trade Token section with Allan Davisson's reflections on the classic reference Dalton & Hamer. But there's much more than tokens in the sale - see below for links to earlier announcements highlighting Greek, Roman, Scottish and other coinage. -Editor

The late Eighteenth Century token series has been an important part of our business since we started issuing catalogs. My fascination with the series started with a few pieces I got from a dealer at a small show in the late 1970's — inexpensive and relatively high-grade examples of copper pieces nearly two centuries old at the time I began.

By the mid 1980's I realized that there was a problem finding the huge reference volume that had been published in parts in the teens (20th century, not 19th) and even the reprints were rare and not printed as clearly as the technology of the late 1980's allowed. So, I had both a good reason and a good excuse to spend time, energy, and money in an effort to not only reprint a higher quality edition of Dalton and Hamer but also to make an effort to find new varieties of the series.

In short, I spent about three years traveling, buying, and putting together the edition of Dalton and Hamer we published as the 1990 update. I acquired two original sets of the 1910 to 1918 series of publications and selected the best example of each page to have photographed by the printer. We used the best gray scale images possible of the collotype continuous gray scale images used in the originals. Our 1990 update and later editions all sold out fairly quickly and I began to notice that our edition was often cited in sale catalogs.

And the series continues to appear in all of our sales. Now, as when I began, it offers a look into a period when manufacturing coins became technically superior to what had been done in earlier years, and collecting these "unofficial" pieces became popular. Two names stand out — Matthew Boulton and the Soho Mint at Birmingham, and James Conder of Ipswich, the first to publish a catalog of the series that reached the United States (and led American collectors to title the series "Conder tokens").

Since its first publication Dalton & Hamer (D&H) has remained a powerful definition of the series. I am unaware of another century-old publication whose original descriptions and order has remained strictly definitive for such a highly popular area. (Sheldon's numbers—over a half century old—are still the basis for US large cents but I have 6 3/4 inches of tall hardbound volumes on my library shelf that further explicate US large cent series.)

There have been catalog publications and proposals to rearrange the pieces in Dalton and Hamer, and regular collectors of the series have seen these rearranged catalogs. Some make an effort to list by a more accurate geographical base. Some of the locations in Dalton and Hamer are placed in what is now considered the wrong county. Others have decided to list in order of manufacturer. None of the new configurations seem to have stuck. The latest token sale catalog I have on my desk came from Baldwin's—a new firm that took over the old Baldwin's along with the name. They have tried other formats but have returned to the traditional D&H order. (They also cite our 2004 edition in their list of references.)

All this discussion was stimulated by watching the PBS show Antiques Roadshow which has been rerunning old versions and then comparing prices now with prices a decade or two ago. By my unofficial count, something over 60% of the pieces have had their value either stay the same or decrease. Fashions and enthusiasms change over time. But the amazing thing about these pieces of copper—trade tokens, political tokens, artistic expression tokens, satirical tokens, temperance tokens (yes, there is one in this sale), royal event tokens (or medals if you prefer), vanity tokens—they are all there and they are all as fascinating to us now as they were to people in the past like Waters, Cokayne, Birchell, Spence, Sharp, Chetwynd, Atkins, Pye, and many more of us still enthused about this fascinating chapter of numismatic as well as British history.

This catalog contains many choice pieces from several impressive collections that have come our way. I hope you enjoy them.