All Nations Stamp & Coin reported more bidders compared to last year at this March’s milestone auction, the firm’s 1,400th in more than 26 years, with realizations nearing 110 per cent of the presale estimates.
On March 11, the Vancouver firm owned by long-time dealer and auctioneer Brian Grant Duff offered more than 230 lots, covering a range of numismatic and philatelic material from Canada and worldwide.
Among the top-earning Canadian coins, a 1948 silver dollar brought $1,815, nearly doubling its $1,000 estimate. From the series’ rarest issue with only 18,780 examples struck, the example was graded Extremely Fine-40 by International Coin Certification Service.
“Good material with eye-appeal did well,” said Duff. “High cataloguing material with less eye-appeal underperformed.”
The sale, which marked Duff’s first live auction with an in-person bidding floor in three years, saw “only a handful in attendance” at the All Nations storefront in west Vancouver.
“Even some who intended to come stayed away,” he said, referencing colds and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Most of his bidders continued to participate online.