The Norweb Collection - An American Legacy

When Emery May had finished annotating an auction catalogue, and had included any comments she had about rarity, cataloguing mistakes she had found, and so on, she gave it to her father. Albert then entered his maximum bids in the left margin, next to lots he and Emery May wanted to acquire. After this, the next step was to learn more about the lots to be sold, to check the cataloguer's grading, and to see the coins they were interested in, what we would call today determining the "eye appeal" of the coins.

From the few catalogues that have survived we cannot tell for sure if Albert and Emery May ever personally inspected lots prior to an auction. We know that Albert rarely, if ever, attended auction sales in person-he was just too busy with his business affairs, and Emery May was too young to do so for him, unescorted. Possibly their agent bidders, the professionals who bid on their behalf in auctions, made the visual inspections for them. Possibly, they simply accepted the cataloguer's grading of coins they wanted to buy, if they trusted his opinion. Their situation is identical to the options presented to bidders in today's coin auction sales.

In whichever way they checked the grading in auction sales, there were lots they felt were not graded accurately, and in these cases Emery May later noted the accurate grade of the coin in the right hand margin, next to the lot description. Albert Holden would then review his maximum bids on lots that they felt had not been graded accurately, making whatever revisions to his bids he felt were necessary. His bids would then be given to his agent, or agents, for he might have commissioned several agents to bid for him in the same sale, a bidding tactic later used to advantage by his daughter. Then he and Emery May would wait for the sale results. When these arrived, whether by telephone from his agentts) telling him which lots he was successful in buying, or in the form of an invoice from the auction company for the lots he had bought, Emery May would enter his initials in the left margin of the catalogue, next to the lots her father had purchased.

The whole process of reading, criticizing, and annotating auction sale catalogues was carried out in a very orderly fashion, with clear cut divisions of responsibility between father and daughter. Careful records were kept of past purchases, listing vendor, date of sale, grade of the coin, and what the coin cost them. Their cost price was usually written in a letter code. They had their own, secret cost code: a two word phrase known only to themselves containing exactly 10 letters. Each letter corresponded to a number from 1 to 10. Any number could be encoded into its corresponding letter, and so a combination of numbers, as a dollar amount, for example, could be encoded into what would look like a meaningless jumble of letters.

To illustrate, suppose we take the letters of Albert Fairchild Holden's name. There are more than ten letters here, and since we can only use ten if the code is to work, we can shorten his name to ALBERT OWNS. If we assign the numbers 1 through ten to these ten letters, then A = 1, L = 2, B = 3, and so on down to S = 10. Now, let us assume we want to pay $125.65 for a particular coin in an auction, but do not want anyone sitting near us to know how much we are willing to pay for the piece. Encoding $125.65 with our letter assignment code, that figure becomes ALR.QR, and the meaningless sequence of letters effectively hides the actual figure we have in mind. Of course, the decimal point after the third letter does suggest that our bid is no higher than $999.99, but anyone seeing our code cannot know for certain what the real figure is, because he will not know that our code assigns a number to every letter in it.

Albert's cost code was a variation of a phrase well known to himself and would have made immediate sense to his daughter. His letter code used the words JORDAN MILE. The first word was the name of his father Liberty's first silver mine, the Old Jordan-the start of the family fortune. The second was simply the word "mine" with the third letter changed from "n" to "I" a security measure. The subtle variation he included in it ensured that anyone stumbling on the phrase by accident still could not be sure of its meaning. In later life Emery May adopted it for her own use, just as she adopted her father's grading system for her own acquisitions.

The Young Numismatist

A few examples from Albert Holden's working copy of the Peter Mougey Sale catalogue will illustrate the general remarks we have made.

Lot 5 in that sale was a 1793 large cent, Crosby 9-G (Sheldon-B), the variety with the stem of the sprig parallel with the date numerals below it. Thomas Elder catalogued it as perfectly centered and sharp Uncirculated, calling it the finest known. Emery May's notes in the right hand margin list prior auction appearances of the variety with prices realized as: "Stickney coin sold for 50./Wilson 50. 2 [ie., she and her father graded the Wilson coin Uncirculatedl/Zabriskie 57.50 2 [again, they graded Zabriskie's as Uncirculated.]" Albert's initials are in the left margin, the convention they used to signify that he was the successful bidder on this lot. However, none of the 1793 large cents in the present Norweb Collection traces its pedigree back to the Mougey Sale, and as Albert Holden did not write down his maximum bid level in the left margin, it cannot be known for certain if he was the purchaser of the lot in question. Emery May's price research on prior auction appearances is a true characteristic of a sophisticated collector. She must have spent considerable time looking through her father's past auction catalogues for just that variety of the 1793, and the diligence the search required is another mark of her early maturity as a collector of coins.

Lots 220-222 were three 1841 Proof large cents; the first was fully red, the second was partially red, while the third was a nice, steel blue color. Emery May's notes record that their collection contained an 1841 in AU condition (i.e., numerical grade 3), which had cost $1.00. She recorded that a Proof specimen sold for $12.50 in the Zabriskie Sale of 1909 (catalogued by Henry Chapman). Albert's notes in the left margin bracket all three lots with the notation "7 112 for one", meaning he would pay $7.50, but only for one of the lots.