Julius Held goodies to auction

Mr. Held, a longtime professor of art history at Barnard College, died in 2002 at 97. Now his children have decided to auction a sampling of his collection -- about 620 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures -- on Jan. 29 at Christie’s in New York.

Quite a "sampling"! Perhaps I misremember, but I thought a few of his items were sold shortly after his death. Nothing like this quantity, certainly.

By comparison with today's overheated contemporary-art prices -- one of Damien Hirst's dead animals or Jeff Koons's sculptures can bring many millions of dollars apiece -- Mr. Held’s works might be viewed as relatively inexpensive. The collection has been conservatively estimated to sell for $2 million to $3 million.

Lots of interesting pieces, many of them of greatest interest to scholarly collectors -- and many of the sort regarded by dealers as "difficult". Of course, today's "difficult" can easily become tomorrow's "hot". From the NY Times.

Julius Held's NYT obit is here.

Japanese-Brazilians

One hundred years after the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Brazil, the country as a whole has been reflecting on an anniversary that has left a significant legacy.

Numbering an estimated 1.5 million, there are more people of Japanese descent in Brazil than anywhere in the world outside of Japan itself.

From the BBC.

Old time baseball

From 1878 through 1885, the booming industrial capital of Rhode Island hosted one of the best teams in baseball history: the Providence Grays of the National League. The original Grays won pennants in 1879 and 1884 -- and in the latter year, captured baseball's first World Series, sweeping the New York Metropolitans.

For the last decade, a hardy band of local men has been giving local fans a flavor of major-league baseball in that age by dressing up in replica gray uniforms trimmed with sky blue, authentically made of wool ("Hot as hell," shortstop Mike Duggan observes), and playing ball under 1884 National League rules, with 1884 equipment.

That means playing barehanded -- all but the catcher, who works during the game with modified hand gloves. It means using exact replicas of a big, heavy 1880s bat stamped with the name Burlingame. The original was produced in Providence at a woodshop on 41 Harrison St., not far from the original ball park on Messer Street.

From the Providence Journal. Missed the exhibition game the other weekend, but it's good to get a little background before catching the next.

Security through obscurity

They didn't exactly hire two guys with a truck to secretly move one of the world's largest and most valuable coin collections over the weekend in Manhattan. But they did use five standard-issue moving vans.

No armored-car convoys. No helicopter gunships. No National Guard outriders flourishing automatic weapons. Just sweaty movers, in blue shirts with their names stitched at the front, schlepping 425 plastic packing crates that were filled with treasures trussed in humble bubble wrap and garden-variety vinyl packing tape.

Yes, the New York Police Department provided an escort, but during more than eight hours on Saturday, one of the great hoards of coins and currency on the planet, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was utterly unalarmed as it was bumped through potholes, squeezed by double-parked cars and slowed by tunnel-bound traffic during the trip to its fortresslike new vault a mile to the north.

From the NY Times.

I haven't visited the American Numismatic Society since it was in its old home on Audubon Terrace; it will be a pleasure to see the collections in their new home -- and perhaps to get around to pursuing a couple of long-postponed research projects at the same time.

Honi soit and all that

Who does the Washington Post have writing their obituaries, anyway?

Tall, irreverent and fond of Turkish cigarettes, Mr. Mott attracted attention with his flamboyance. At one soiree in Washington in 1983, guests rode an elephant on the sidewalk while wearing gold sashes announcing in roughly translated French, "Shame on those who think badly of this."

Garter motto references here and here.