The Richard Eidswick Collection

Welcome to Nomos 27! This special auction contains 100 Greek coins, struck in gold, electrum, silver and bronze, and ranging in date from the late 7th down into the 2nd century BC; they very much reflect the interests and tastes of the collector who put them together. They were’t picked because of their superior condition - though they all are very nice, indeed! - nor because they were all from a certain period, or a certain area, or a certain size or a certain metal; they were picked simply because their owner - Richard ‘Dick’ Eidswick - liked them! After all, that is a perfectly good reason to collect. Dick was born in 1936 in Santa Rosa, California, but grew up in Oregon. His education was wide-ranging: degrees in engineering from San Jose State, business from New York University and wine (what else?) from the University of California in Davis. He has a had a career as a high tech entrepreneur, been a venture capitalist, and even spent five years as president of Champ Car World Series racing! He began collecting coins when he was 12 in 1948: first US coins and then, as he got older, modern issues from all the countries he traveled to on business. But then, in April 1995, he was in New York City, walked into Stack’s and bought his first ancient coin, a gold stater of Alexander the Great (here lot 71). He had long been interested in the history of Ancient Greece - from Homer to Herodotus, Perikles, Philip and Alexander - and actually owning coins from those times made everything more real. He found that every coin, whether fairly common or very rare, had a story that went with it; as did their types, whether aesthetically pleasing, elaborate and designed by a great artist (like the spectacular Syracusan tetradrachm by Eukleidas - lot 45), or just a simple and rudimentary design from the dawn of coinage (as on the electrum hemistater minted in Ionia during the 2nd half of the 7th century BC - lot 93). Not only did the coins themselves have much to tell, but so did the fellow collectors and dealers Dick met in the course of his Odyssey, who became his friends, and spent hours in enthusiastic conversation with him. He met Leo Mildenberg at a Leu auction in Zurich and received some sage advice which was followed closely behind by words of wisdom from Silvia Hurter; became a Fellow of the ANS, ended up on the Board of Trustees for 9 years, and was a founding member of the Sage Society. We both remember many meals together in Zürich with astute connoisseur collectors who valued beauty, style and rarity as much as grade and the discussions went well into the evening with, yes, just a bit of that wine he studied so carefully decades before! Looking through this catalogue, which contains the final, and most important, part of Dick’s collection, you can really feel the happiness and excitement its acquisition gave him: from an inexpensive, but pretty, little Syracusan bronze bought from an art teacher in Livonia (lot 49), to a splendid, and expensive, Syracusan dekadrachm acquired from a Peus sale in Frankfurt (lot 47). As they say, time flies: We have known Dick for some 25 years now and are proud that we have been chosen to present his collection to an international audience. Alan has spent quite some time cataloguing the collection with an eye to the taste of the collector and the stories of the coins. Once it is all successfully sold it will be interesting to see what Dick turns to next!