Ships on Coins and Sarawak at Spink

Ship Coins and Medals to Sarawak at Spink - William Brooke Christensen at Auction

Author and long time contributor to the Standard Catalog of World Coins, Yossi Dotan, has long held an interest in the subject of Ships on coins. Over the years Dotan has compiled data and complete extensive research on the subject of coins depicting watercraft.

Recently Dotan began the process of publishing a series of three volumes covering this thematic collecting area with the release of Watercraft on World Coins Volume I: Europe, 1800-2005. The next two books scheduled for Dotan's trilogy will be Volume II: America and Asia, 1800-2008 followed later by Volume III: Africa and Oceania, 1800-2011.

For those interested in ships on coins, Dotan's books should prove both enjoyable and essential for reading and reference.

Another worthwhile addition to a thematic Watercraft or Ship coin token and medal collection library will be the recent Spink auction catalog containing the Nautical Theme coin and token collection of William Brooke Christensen. The Spink London 199 auction closed yesterday selling about 40 lots of Bill's ship coins and tokens, some of them pretty hard to find types. Bill was a very interesting guy. I had the pleasure of meeting him years ago when he was still running the auction firm founded by his father, Henry Christensen, which specialized in Latin American coins.

Bill's collecting interests differed from his fathers, as he fancied himself tied to the Brooke family of White Rajahs ruling in Sarawak from the 1840's to the 1940's. Next week Spink will offer Christensen's banknote and coin collections of Sarawak which are the most complete I have ever seen at auction. These collections will be sold on July 4th in Singapore. It's a fine tribute to a classic numismatist!