Outstanding Coin Dealers & Auction Houses
Jess Peters ... A Great Source of Mexican Silver
Many Mexican coin collectors overlook Jess Peters and his auctions as a source of information and many great Mexican coins. Many numismatic historians have a tendency relegate Peters as a minor auctioneer, which maybe true when compared to other great U.S. coin auction houses if one only considers U.S. coins. However, Jess’s specialty was foreign coins, and he handled a number of extreme rarities and scores of mid-level rarities, many of them from Mexico. According to Martin Gengerke (American Numismatic Auctions 1990) Peters produced 129 catalogs, containing 5,010 pages with 127,457 lots of coins, thus making him a major player in the foreign coin market during his time.
According to Gengerke, Peters’ first auction catalog was produced for a mail bid sale dated March 10, 1964 and his last sale, before his untimely death, was a live auction for the International Numismatic Society Convention on January 19, 1984. In the ensuing 20 years Jess handled many great foreign coin collections including those of the great Ray Byrne in multiple sales from 1975 until 1977. Peters was well known to COIN convention goers, he produced auctions in 1970, 1973, and 1983. He was also involved in the early FUN conventions producing auctions for the 1974, 1975, and 1976 shows. Peters went on to produce the ANA’73 sale, several for the Hawaii State Numismatic Association, other state numismatic associations such as Missouri, Michigan, Texas, Virginia and Illinois in different years plus the SIN and CICF (Chicago International Coin Fair), however his many mail bid sales are where many Mexican coins, especially silver, crossed over the public auction block.
At this time (May, 2004) I have been able to find only 85 of his 129 sales for my reference library, therefore you can see from this number that some of Peters’ sales are difficult to find. All of the early catalogs from March 1964 until the end of 1965 are some of the most difficult to find. Another interesting item is the frequency with which he published catalogs, averaging one every other month or so from 1964 until 1980 when he slowed down to about three to four per year.
Only 22 of my 85 catalogs have any Mexican Republic gold in them, but the majority have at least some Mexican silver in them, sometimes in large numbers. It would behoove serious Mexican silver collectors to investigate the Jess Peters catalogs as I haven’t done a good population survey from the different epochs and the silver coins contained in Peters’ sales yet.
Now let’s take a look at some of Jess’s more notable sales:
Peters’ first sale with a significant number of Mexican Republic gold coins, at least in my library, occurred in his mail bid sale of October 13, 1970 when he offered 16 coins:
½ Escudos (7):
1 Escudos (1):
2 Escudos (2):
4 Escudos (none):
8 Escudos (none):
1 Pesos (1):
2½ Pesos (1):
5 Pesos (1):
10 Pesos (1):
20 Pesos (2):
Jess offered a great collection of Mexican silver (crowns and minors) in the TNA’75 Sale, but no Mexican Republic gold. Then in March 1978 for CICF’78 he offered a very large collection of Latin American Colonial silver, including many Mexican coins. His next to the last sale was the COIN’83 sale where he had a nice selection of Mexican coins including 15 Republican gold coins.
Jess Peters met an untimely death, but even today there is much buried treasure within his many auction catalogs for those willing to spend some time mining his catalogs. By the way if you have one of his ANA’73 Convention Sale catalogs I would like to borrow or buy it, because I have been unable to find one.
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