Continued ......
Every person reading this who owns any better grade Australia State, Australia Roos and KGV, and Papua, and GRI
MUST read this. The value of your collection just went up is WHY!
Almost no-one reading this knew a major action took place on Thursday November 23 in Zurich Switzerland – Friday November 24 Australia time. This was the
Besançon collection. Huh? Me too.
Had never heard of Besançon, but due to the wonders of google I discover it is -
Besançon the capital of Doubs and the former capital of Franche-Comt, a region in eastern France close to the border with Switzerland. So there!
Whoever was buying the stamps in Besançon bought some very nice ones, that is for sure. Was presumably a family collection, and many of the stamps were from collections sold 50 or 60 years back, but some of them were from recent sales like Hugh Morgan of Melbourne, so a very mixed bag.
The stamps were auctioned by Swiss company Corinphila which I am sure 95% of active Australia collectors have never, or only barely heard of. They are a well established auction house in Switzerland, but would be far better known of course by collectors of Switzerland and Germany and Europe which is where most of their bread and butter material comes from.
Anyway they somehow got consigned this Besançon collection. And the first section of it ran it to auction late November. Did they TELL the 100s of cashed up local collectors here they were doing this - of course not! I am sure a small handful of their client base are Australia collectors, nd were advised by company emails etc, but that is being generous I am sure.
Corinphila in their vast wisdom did not take page ads in
"Stamp News" to ADVISE collectors this great material was going to be offered. They DID however send the Managing Director and an offsider to fly out with the material for viewing in October, and 2 x doubtless Business Class air tickets, and hotels, and internal flights, and entertainment, and a
TON of insurance cover cost on the value of it all, likely costing them 50 or 100 times more than a page ad, but hey - what would I know about marketing and promotion! 8)
I had no idea the sale was occurring until Rod Perry was lamenting on stampboards they did not attribute a nice block of 6 of Victoria SG #1 as having his ownership provenance listed in past owners.
Anyway I saw that post here
after the Swiss had flown back to Zurich with their stamps, that I'd have loved to inspect first hand. I then needed to email and ask for a sale catalogue for goodness sakes.
The sale got strong results, HOWEVER clearly they'd have been a
TON higher had Corinphila done the bare basics, and advertised the sale was taking place, in the local stamp press.
I urge all readers to make a cup of coffee. And click on this link below and go through it page by page.
The auction does have SG and ACSC values for most lots, added in that quirky European style.
The hammer prices realised are is Swiss Francs which if course is a far stronger currency than the $A.
And then one must add all the horrific fees and changes and imposts and taxes that Swiss auctioneers are famous for.
So in brief, multiply the hammer price by 1.50 to ROUGHLY see what the $A price of each lot was invoiced at.
i.e. Lot 616 a mint NSW Sydney view was 25,000 CHF hammer which means someone was invoiced about $A37,500. Full SG is £9,000 or $A15,750,
so it sold for WAY over twice full SG, and so on throgh the catalogue.
Make a cup of coffee and turn your phone and TV off, and go through this link start to finish –
https://corinphila.ch/en/_auctions/&action=showLots&auctionI ... s=1&page=1
Page by page.
There are MASSES of things that got more than FULL SG and FULL ACSC as you can see. Astounding.
I'll add some examples after dinner. OR add your comments here by all means.
