The FoxLair
Mexican Republic Gold Sales Index Report©
Late in 1985 I discovered a problem with the currently available rarity and value information found in the few books about Mexican Republic Gold and 8 Reales after attending the second “great” sale of the Norweb Collection by Christie’s in November 1985. The values published in the then current crop of catalogs and the price estimates in the Christie’s catalog were ridiculous, as many of the Norweb coins sold reached multiples of those listed. Yes, a few coins sold within the price estimates, and a few sold for less, but on the average the prices realized were much greater.
I erroneously supposed the coin values in all future works about the Mexican Republic coins would reflect these increases in prices, but I was wrong, as usual!
My collecting goals had shifted dramatically in the few years I had been collecting Mexican coins. I had gone from a casual collector to a serious collector of varieties in the 8 Reales and the 8 Escudos in a very short time. I searched for a mentor in each series, or good books about each, but it would be several years before I found other serious or advanced collectors of either series that would help a neophyte collector. However, "the book" about either series just didn't exist! Therefore, I was in a personal dilemma: What could I do to learn the knowledge I needed to go to the next level of collecting?
Because I was involved in the computer industry, I decided I would first create a computerized list of all Mexican Republic 8 Reales and 8 Escudos DAMs (Date/Assayer/Mintmark) and all the varieties I could find for each. This was the direct result being unable to find any good published list of these coins. By this time I was already finding many unpublished varieties and even a few DAMs.
Once I had a fairly good list established I began work on capturing all of the public sales of my selected coins. At this time I kept all of these records on a large IBM 360 mainframe computer; this was before the days of any PCs (personal computers)!
Soon one of my customers, Texas Instruments, introduced a PC and I quickly secured one (for a price of almost $4,000) to keep all Mexican Republic coin records, so as not to interfere with my main business. You see Mexican Republic coins had now become a passion for me.
One thing that I had to do almost immediately was create a numbering system, because computers sort more easily with numbers rather than with words. So, with the help of one of the computer programmers working for me, we created our first of several numbering scheme in 1987. This numbering system would change several times over the next 16 or 17 years, until Kirk Menczer designed the final one.
During 1986 I started my population survey of all Mexican Republic 8 Escudos and a few of the rarer 8 Reales, which still continues today, even though I have greatly expanded the scope of data and coins included.
Our most comprehensive product from this project is an in-depth report that looks at each individual coin sale (currently over 22,000+ sales) found in my 25+ years of research that includes all data about each Republican gold coin sale we have found between 1878 and today. This report’s information is sold by individual DAM (Date/Assayer/Mintmark) and sells for $5.00 each per denomination DAM. Included in this report is the following information about each and every sale of any particular DAM:
Now that you know what we capture on about sale, would you like to see a sample of this report? If so, I'm sorry this report's format in Microsoft Excel is too large and complex to display on this limited knowledge website! Therefore, if you are interested in seeing a sample, email me (FoxLairAJ@aol,com) I will either email a sample back to you or snail mail it to you.
As mentioned earlier, this is an on-going project, therefore if you order this report you will receive the most current data from our files. The reports from this file are currently only available in a printed form and you must complete the order form [01c] and send it along with your check or money order before we begin proceeding your order.
Thanks for your interest and we look forward to hearing from you if you have any questions about this report or any other item.
Sorry, No Sample Report is available on the website
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