A legendary person and a legendary collection. One of the few women in the post of great numismatists and great collections.
J. Strzałkowski writes about her in the work "Collections of Polish coins and medals" published in 1991, and I quote:
"Starzyńska Izabela, 1807-1897, daughter of Minister T. Mostowski, in 1823-1829 second wife of Aleksander Potocki.... Before 1853 she inherited a collection from A. Urbanowski and supplemented this with purchases in Warsaw and later in Dresden. W 1865... the collection numbered 2555 coins and 274 medals. She had two beautiful cabinets for coins after Marie Antoinette. The collection was sold at auction in 1885 at the Berlin firm of Weyl. The rarest went to the collection: E. Hutten-Czapski, A. Plater and K. Sobanski. A catalog of the collection was made by K. Beyer....".
At the same time, the information given by Strzałkowski about auction sales is inaccurate. He writes about an auction in 1885 organized by Adolph Weyl's company, while the sale of Countess Starzyńska's collection was conducted at an auction in 1883 (this catalog), and in bid form in 1885 (catalog under the next item). The inaccuracies in Strzalkowski's information only show how rare catalogs we are dealing with here and how little known the period in Polish numismatics is.
Catalog in a period binding. Binding uniform, in nice marbled paper. Paper escutcheon on the spine, paper title label on the front, decorative in shape. Outside format 225 x 154 mm.
Inside, paper quite heavily crumbled (period of printing on acidic wood paper). Cracked at the spine, but not broken, title page; two other pages due to cracking almost loose, others only with loose sewing to the block, but no damage.
The catalog section is 8 pages - 16 numbered pages - listing 537 items offered.
An amazing offering, the auction begins with Danzig issues, numbers 1-54 are mainly multiple gold and thalers. Elblag and Lithuania follow, where, for example, the portugal of Sigismund Augustus 1562. Crown issues from number 71 onward impress with their richness. Further on, from number 333, various issues, including many related to Poland .
The catalog comes with the original printed result list. List prices meticulously transcribed in red ink next to each item. The character of the handwriting indicates the hand of W. Chominski, from whose bookcase the present piece comes, and his dry ownership stamp imprinted in the upper right corner of the title page.
Looking through this small, inconspicuous catalog, we see accumulated in it items that now adorn the largest Polish museum collections!
A unique catalog with a magnificent offering of amazing rarity of Polish numismatic items.
This is the first time we see this item, not only in the trade, but in general.