So You Think You Can Dance (or Produce an Auction Catalog)

We’re in the home stretch with our Sedwick Treasure and World Coin Auction #17 catalog! Let me tell you why it’s a Herculean effort by a few people…and a job best left to the pros.

Auction and catalog production begins many months prior to the auction date as we reach out to consignors to send or bring their consignments to us for evaluation and approval. This is the really fun part of the auction process because we never know what’s going to come through the door, and picking up packages at the post office seems a bit like Christmas. While most consignments consist of coins, there are also great consignments of artifacts and good old-fashioned pirate stuff:  swords, cannons, cannonballs, blunderbusses. Each coin and artifact is weighed and measured.

Once we’ve decided that enough is enough and the deadline for consignments has drawn to an end, the real work begins. The order of lots is established (see the table of contents of any one of our catalogs for how we concatenate), and lot cards are designed and printed. Now we can shuffle lots from their temporary order to the lot-card order, and Dan can begin to study each auction lot to write up a description for the catalog. At the same time, Augi fires up his photography studio to begin the time-consuming process of photographing each lot. He will finish the process on the computer to arrive at the beautiful images you see in our catalogs.

In between we must find time to go to shows to promote auction items and give buyers a chance to see coins first hand. This is the best opportunity for anyone who has an interest to really be sure that a coin is what we say it is, so if you want to view auction lots for our upcoming auction on April 29-30, 2015, come see us at either the Whitman Baltimore Spring Expo on March 26-29, 2015, at the Baltimore Convention Center or at Chicago International Coin Fair on April 9-12, 2015, at the Crown Plaza Chicago O’Hare.

After our auction catalog is professionally printed, we quickly send catalogs out to many, many potential bidders. Are you one of them? The link to the auction will be available soon on our website, so stay tuned!

Tags: auction, cob, hobby, numismatic, show