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The Camden Collection
An Overview
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The Camden Collection was built by family collectors over a period of 80 years and has never been seen by or offered to the public before. By virtue of personal friendship, the family has partnered with Alfred's Auctions for exclusive access to the assets in The Collection for auction. The initial offerings will be guided toward adding value to a large range of collectors. In later offerings some of the more unique assets of The Collection will be offered which may be of interest to a select number of collectors. All offerings will be described and photographed as accurately as possible. Payment methods include credit card and wire transfer.
The Collection consists primarily of modern US coin types and currencies but also includes coins and currencies from about 40 other countries. Owners of The Camden Collection have graded, catalogued and preserved over 30,000 pieces as of July 2024. An additional 40,000 pieces that are already logged into The Collection are awaiting the process of final grading and preservation. This process will continue to raise the value and safety of the Collection. An additional 20,000 pieces that are considered high potential assets to the Collection are also in the process of being graded, catalogued and preserved.
The processing of pieces within The Collection permits no physical touching without cotton gloves. No "cleaning" of coins is permitted other than gentle cotton wiping to assure safe long-term preservation. The Collection is graded using the Sheldon Scale and the PCGS grading criteria. The values assigned to each piece corresponds to the published PCGS or NGC values. The family owners are experienced graders through the 100,000's of coins being studied in the Collection. Benchmarking to 3rd party grading has generally proven the Collection grading process to be slightly conservative.
To assure long term preservation within The Collection no piece with any evidence of metal corruption is permitted. A piece must be graded before final storage and it can only be stored with pieces of similar metal content that are graded at the same level. All pieces in The Collection are stored in sealed plastic containers designed for coin preservation that have unique ID's. Pieces that are graded higher than MS65 must be stored in individual Air Tight capsules and stored in Air Tight containers to ensure the patina characteristics are maintained.
The Collection is managed and maintained through the Exact Change collection management database tool. The tool provides the needed flexibility to track and manage a large assortment of coins with appropriate characterization in terms of data, visual content and reporting. The Camden Collection is currently valued at a little over $1.5M. It is expected that at the completion of processing the assets currently in The Camden Collection, that the totla value of the collection will increase to a little over $3M. This offering is the minute tip of the glacier.
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