Sunday 4 November 2012

Pieces of the Past for All: Antiquarian Store "Allowing Orders to U.S. Addresses Only"

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At the last MOU hearing in Washington not long ago, Wayne Sayles clearly told the CPAC that he was not a dealer - as he had retired at the end of 2011. Well, it looks as if he's decided to come back, without Mr Lavender (now trading from Florida with a very intriguing inventory as Moneta Numismatic Services). So here he is on his new website. Oddly enough, the website where we do not currently find him is the V-Coins portal.

He is currently advertising a puzzling job lot on Moneta-L.
Coins from the James Theselius Collection (JTC) are now being offered at the WGSStore . This collection was formed over two decades and includes many rarities. It is the most impressive collection of Turkoman coins that I have ever seen. More than 200 coins have already been posted and several hundred more are in the pipeline.
The ones I clicked on were not exactly over-endowed with information where they had come from and when they arrived in the USA and how. So I guess that would make it one of the largest private collections of unprovenanced Turkoman coins to have come on the market recently. So what is the origin of this material? Who is this James Theselius of Wisconsin (might have guessed, eh?) [in any case,  only 112 coins are currently posted, not "more than 200"].

I find the product codes interesting. If the ones preceded by "JTC" are those from the "James Theselius Collection", are the ones preceded by "WGS" from the Wayne Gerald Sayles Collection? Is Sayles selling off his own collection? If these are his, one might ask why so few of them have any form of provenance information either. It's an odd collection, there are some fine pieces labelled WGS (as one would expect from such a collector) but also some real crap.

I was interested in this bit:
Terms and Conditions
All objects sold by Wayne G. Sayles, Antiquarian are guaranteed to be authentic and as described in regard to attribution and condition. [...] Valid title to all property is guaranteed by the seller.
But one assurance is missing from that, isn't it? The seller may feel entitled to guarantee "they-can't-touch-you-for-it"-title (sic), but can he guarantee licit origins and licit export from the source county in the case of each and every item sold here? Is he willing to do that, and justify individually to the responsible and concerned collector just why in each individual case he is handling he can guarantee that? I see no mention of affiliation of "WGS Antiquarian" to any professional body with a code of ethics, either enforced or rubber-stamped. Not even a mention of the V-coins Code of Ethics which he used to abide by as a V-Coiney, or even the ACCG one. Why is that?

UPDATE 25th Nov 2012:
Contrary to what Sayles makes of this post ("Archaeologist Barford endorses WGS Store") this is NOT any kind of "endorsement" for his pathetic little webshop. What a twerp. I would certainly not myself buy any dugup antiquity from a store which does not offer UP FRONT the information about which I wroyte, and would strongly advise RESPONSIBLE collectors to look carefully at the way the sales offers are phrased before even considering offering the executive director of an organization  like the the ACCG (by his own account also apparently on a  US watch-list) their custom.

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