What makes a good numismatic investment? What makes one collectible coin steadily increase in value year after year, while another languishes in price for decades at a time? It is a deceptively simple question. But the correct answer could ensure windfall profits for the savvy hard asset investor.
In order to properly explore this question, we first need to define what makes a coin desirable. In reality, coins are miniature works of art struck on tiny metal blanks. And like any other artwork, the best coins are impressive, imparting a deep sense of beauty and gravitas to the viewer.
Although there are a number of subjective features that can endow a coin with eye appeal, there are also some that are thankfully objective in nature. The quintessential numismatic investment will tend to share these desirable objective traits.
First on the list is size. The diameter of a coin is analogous to the size of an artist’s blank canvas. It is hard for a painter to produce a masterpiece on canvas that is 6 inches by 6 inches. Likewise, it is difficult for a die engraver to cram a compelling design onto a coin that is only the size of a U.S. dime – 17.9 mm across.
It is the behemoths of the coin world that really wow us. People are absolutely smitten with large coins, like old silver dollars and pre-1933 gold double eagles. And it is easy to see why. These remarkable coins are not only dripping with history, but also luxuriously massive.
And this trend holds true if we examine ancient coins, too. It is the chunky Athenian tetradrachms and substantial Roman sestertii that fire the imagination of Classical numismatic enthusiasts.
Of course, size isn’t everything.
The metal that a coin is struck from is every bit as important as its size – perhaps even more so. The rule of thumb is very simple here: the more valuable the metal, the more desirable the coin. So gold, the king of metals, sits atop our numismatic investment hierarchy, followed by the other metals.
All else being equal, a coin struck in gold is more valuable than the same coin minted in silver. And the same holds true for silver versus bronze. This is because precious metals hold an eternal charm that transcends time and culture.
In addition, coins struck in gold and silver are higher denomination pieces that were more likely to have circulated among important people and institutions. For instance, a medieval British gold noble coin of King Edward III, might actually have been held by Edward III! And although there is no way to know for certain who might have touched which coin, a good numismatic investment always has a bit of whimsy or fairy tale in it.
Speaking of ancient and medieval coins, age is also a factor in numismatic desirability. A very old coin allows the viewer to cross a metaphorical sea of time and connect emotionally with a past culture. In my opinion, however, age usually has a relatively modest impact on a coin’s desirability, especially compared to size or composition.
So when we put all of these attributes together, what do we get? What kind of coins are a good numismatic investment?
Simply put, you want to buy relatively large coins that are made out of silver or almost any size coin that is made out of gold. Lastly, older is better than newer, although only marginally.
We can check our thesis by examining the U.S. rare coin market. Which types of coins are most popular with collectors and command the highest prices. If we ignore ultra-rarities and key dates, we find that pre-1933 gold coins, old silver dollars and many varieties of silver half dollars stand above other types of U.S. coins in terms of desirability. In addition, older pieces, such as late 18th and very early 19 century coins from the early years of the U.S. Republic, have an added dimension of desirability.
So if you are looking to make a numismatic investment, large coins struck from precious metal are the way to go from a big picture point of view.
I do understand that there are very dedicated niche collector groups for Indian Head pennies, Mercury dimes, Buffalo nickels and many other smaller U.S. coin series. But personally, as an investor, I would leave these coins to the collectors. They lack the necessary “wow” factor for investment purposes.
So where do I see value in U.S. coins right now? Well, I very much like AU-58 NGC and PCGS certified pre-1933 U.S. gold coins that possess good eye appeal. AU-58 coins are usually significantly less expensive than MS-60 to MS-62 examples, but typically look much better than them. This makes many series of AU-58 coins potentially good investments. I would, however, avoid gold dollar coins as I think these are far too small with a diameter of only 13 mm (0.51 inches) to 15 mm (0.59 inches).
In addition, I think that slabbed Morgan silver dollars in MS-63 or better condition are finally poised to ascend in value after moving sideways for the last 25 years. Morgan silver dollars have everything going for them. They are large, photogenic coins with a stellar design that really encapsulates the romance of the American Old West. And with the exception of the anomalous 1921 date, they are all well over 100 years old at this point.
I also have a surprise sleeper hit: proof American gold and silver eagle bullion coins. 50 years in the future, no one will want to own most U.S. coinage from the 1970s or later. This is because silver was removed from circulating U.S. coins in the 1960s, leaving us with a miserable base-metal token coinage. Instead, American gold and silver eagle bullion coins issued from the 1980s onwards will be seen as the only convincing numismatic investment of the period.
American eagle bullion coins are struck by the U.S. Mint from pure, .999 fine silver and 22 karat, .917 fine gold. The collector’s proof versions are not only struck multiple times to ensure a crisp, frosted finish, but are also much scarcer than the run-of-the-mill uncirculated bullion variety. They are appropriately massive as well; a 1 troy ounce American silver eagle coin is both heavier and larger than a Morgan silver dollar.
What makes a good numismatic investment? It is a question well worth asking – and one that I hope I’ve helped you answer.
I love antique silver. It combines beauty, utility and intrinsic value in a way that almost no other antique can. So it shouldn’t be surprising that I occasionally browse eBay, Etsy and other online platforms looking for the perfect antique silver investment.
What I intend to do in this article is walk you through my thought process as I hunt, research and purchase my latest fine antique silver investment. In some ways, this article will be similar to my spotlight posts, where I examine the investment pros and cons of a specific antique or vintage item.
My process starts with looking through hundreds of antique listings online. Of course I narrow down the search to a specific category beforehand. In this instance, I was interested in vintage silver cigarette cases.
Cigarette cases were popular from the late 19th century through the 1960s. Smoking exploded in popularity during the 20th century and cigarette cases quickly became a de rigueur personal luxury accessory – much like today’s smartphone. As a result, a lot of high-end, solid-silver cigarette cases have survived. Better yet, the nicest ones were decorated with chased or engraved designs and occasionally accented with applied gold monograms or bejeweled thumb-catches.
High-end cigarette cases are premier investment-grade antiques. But the market for them is in the dumps right now for a few reasons. First, there is more supply than demand because a smaller percentage of the population smokes these days.
In addition, relatively few people have figured out that vintage cigarette cases are an easy and stylish way to store business cards, credit cards, money, pills, or any other small items you might have. This keeps demand down and prices low.
Finally, the poor economy has crippled discretionary spending in the antique market. There is far less casual and impulse purchasing in the industry than before the 2008-2009 recession, which suppresses the prices of many antiques.
In other words, these are ideal conditions for me (or you) to make an antique silver investment. You always want to buy when prices are low and an asset class is hated; not when it is popular and expensive.
So I visited eBay and began looking through their listings. First, I narrowed my price range to between $50 and $200 and excluded keywords like “silver plate” and “silver plated”. This helped to eliminate the riff-raff cigarette cases that aren’t solid silver. It also excluded pieces where the seller was asking for an unrealistically high wishing price.
What my search did show was the meaty middle, where there were dozens of high quality silver cigarette cases at reasonable prices. A good rule of thumb is that decent specimens start at around $60, although these low prices can usually only be found in an auction format sale. A good selection of really nice cases is available (in both auction and buy-it-now formats) between $100 and $200. Of course, the best of the best can be more expensive than $200.
Once I had narrowed my search results, I started looking at listings. And I looked…And I looked…And I looked some more.
I typically search through about a thousand listings to find 10 that I like. Out of those 10, I might seriously consider purchasing 1 or 2. That is an ultimate hit rate of 0.1% to 0.2%. In other words, 1 out of 1,000 antiques qualifies as both investable and attractively priced.
In this instance, I saved a few that I liked to my eBay watch list. But I was still on the fence about making a purchase. A couple days later I woke up to a 15% eBay flash sale and decided it was time to make a move on my antique silver investment.
I eventually zeroed in one vintage silver cigarette case in particular: an elegant Mid-Century Modern Danish case by the firm of P. Hertz with a buy-it-now price of $135.
The eponymous company was founded in Copenhagen in 1834 by the Danish silversmith Peter Hertz. After winning a series of international jewelry/silverware exhibitions (Malmo in 1881, Liverpool in 1886, Paris in 1889 and Chicago in 1895), P. Hertz went on to become the official jeweler to the Danish Royal Family in 1906. P. Hertz is still around today and continues to be the Royal Danish court jeweler. However, the company ceased producing silver items in its factories in 1960.
This vintage Danish piece was not only stunning, but also in a near-perfect state of preservation – a true antique silver investment. The condition was superb, with no noticeable dents, a close, tight fitting lid and a completely intact hinge. These are all common problem areas for vintage cigarette cases, but were problem-free on this example. Even the original elastic band that held the cigarettes in place was still in good shape.
The case featured a linear design motif consisting of parallel horizontal lines across the middle of the case flanked by shorter vertical lines towards the top and bottom. The overall effect was quite appealing, while also being absolutely typical of the 1930s and 1940s.
The hallmarks were also appropriate for the period and country of origin. The case had the “P.HERTZ” mark, along with the company’s logo (a crown). The piece also had the assay master’s initials “JS” (Johannes Siggaard), which should appear on every hallmarked piece of Danish silver made between 1932 and 1960. And finally, the case had the Danish “Three Tower Mark”, which guaranteed a minimum purity of .826 fine silver (although higher purity silver sometimes bore the mark, especially in the mid 20th century). Both the Three Tower Mark and the assay master’s initials were double-stamped (once on each half of the case), indicating that the two parts were independently tested for their purity.
However, the most impressive attribute of this Danish antique silver investment was the build quality. The case was very solid, weighing in at a hefty 206 grams – more than 6.6 troy ounces. This gave it a melt value of around $80, which means I would only be paying $55 for the artistic premium of the piece.
And it had a lot of artistic premium.
It was obvious that an incredible amount of care had gone into the creation of this handheld masterpiece. The case’s linear design was chased in high relief and perfectly executed – a sure sign of quality.
In addition, the interior rim had its own engine-turned diamond pattern (visible in the photo below). This was interesting because the decoration wasn’t visible unless the case was open. The average silversmith will cut corners on the underside or non-visible parts of an item. Only a truly dedicated silversmith working on a premium piece will bother to add decorative highlights to a hidden area like the inside rim of a case.
When P. Hertz says they are the official jeweler to Danish royalty, they aren’t kidding. These guys made a stunningly good silver cigarette case – one that would definitely qualify as an antique silver investment.
The buy-it-now price for the piece was $135, but after deducting the 15% eBay promo code, I was down to $114.75. I felt that this was a steal.
The only potential issue was that the seller was an antique dealer located in Moscow’s Tagansky District. As a result, the shipping was a prodigious $22. The high shipping cost did give me pause, but then I asked myself, what would a reasonable shipping cost have been for something located halfway around the world? $10? $12?
Would I really bust the deal over a shipping fee that I felt was $10 too high?
The answer to that was no. I chose to swallow the uncomfortably high shipping charges because the extra cost was trivial compared to the future return potential of this gorgeous antique silver investment. At a grand total of just $136.75 delivered, I felt it was still worth every penny.
We live in a very unusual time where it is possible to buy rare and valuable tangible objects for stupidly low prices – sometimes as little as $100 or $200. This can make it easy to become complacent, leading us to mistakenly believe that the good deals will always be available.
I assure you however, that they will not. Someday, prices will skyrocket and the ridiculously low prices for fine, investment-grade antiques will disappear. When that day finally comes (probably in the not too distant future), we will all wish we had bought more when we had the chance.
Helicopter money is a term popularized by the former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke in his 2002 speech, “Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here“. This speech outlined policies that the Fed could pursue to ensure that deflation didn’t take root in the U.S., thus (hopefully) avoiding the same financial misery that plagued Japan since its twin stock market/property market bubble burst in the early 1990s.
I will quote a relevant excerpt from the talk that Bernanke delivered to the National Economists Club in Washington, D.C.:
“…U.S. dollars have value only to the extent that they are strictly limited in supply. But the U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost. …If we do fall into deflation…we can take comfort that the logic of the printing press example must assert itself, and sufficient injections of money will ultimately always reverse a deflation.”
It is important to point out how radical this financial theory really was at the time. Over the course of the 20th century, central banks have learned the hard lesson that monetizing government debt – buying significant quantities of government bonds either directly from the national treasury or from the secondary market – inevitably leads to the eventual destruction of the currency. In other words, monetizing government debt (aka helicopter money) is nothing more than ugly inflationism that gradually impoverishes a nation.
Although Bernanke’s speech never explicitly mentioned the term “helicopter money”, the concept has nonetheless become intimately associated with his extremist approach to dealing with potentially deflationary economic situations.
The Federal Reserve got a chance to try out Bernanke’s flawed monetary policies after the U.S. housing bubble popped in 2008. This bursting bubble ushered in the country’s most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, Bernanke’s helicopters only dropped money over Wall Street, while Main Street USA was curiously left off the list of money drop destinations.
This was a feature, not a bug.
The Federal Reserve pushed short term interest rates to almost zero for a full 8 years, depriving savers, retirees and the prudent of desperately needed interest income while simultaneously enriching the big banks via inflated net interest margins. The Fed didn’t stop there though. They also engaged in Quantitative Easing, or “QE” for short, where they printed trillions of dollars out of thin air and purchased Treasury and mortgage securities from cash-strapped banks. And then the Fed doubled down by giving trillions more dollars of effectively interest-free loans to banks, insurance companies and other vaguely financial institutions – like the motorcycle maker Harley Davidson!
A Graph of the Federal Funds Rate from 2007 to 2018
Even the U.S. Government had a helicopter money drop of its own when Congress passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which authorized the Treasury to inject up to $700 billion of taxpayer money into banks to make sure they didn’t receive their just desserts (which were bankruptcy, followed by liquidation).
I do have a point with this financial history lesson, so please stay with me.
You see, the excessive debt loads that caused the global economy to grind to a halt in 2008 were never resolved. Instead, the central bankers of the world, in their questionable wisdom, decided to fix a debt problem by loading the world up with even more debt. This is like trying to cure a hangover with a bottle of 80-proof whiskey. It might seem to work wonderfully at first, but eventually you are going to die of alcohol poisoning.
Well, here we are 10 years later slumped over in the financial gutter. Another recession is coming soon and I fear we are ill prepared for it. This looming mega-recession will be massively deflationary, spawning a liquidity crisis/dollar shortage of gargantuan proportions. The Fed will react with sheer panic; none of their highly mathematical (but quite useless) models will have predicted the end of the financial world as we know it.
Initially, the Fed will pursue the same flawed policies it did in the previous crisis. They will lower interest rates back down to zero (or possibly even below zero), purchase Treasury and mortgage debt via QE, and hand out interest-free loans like candy (but only to their big bank friends). They will even hand out fistfuls of dollars to foreign central banks via swap lines to help ensure that foreign banks don’t run out money.
However, these radical steps, which were barely enough to stabilize our crumbling financial system last time, will be utterly insufficient this time around. The debt-laden economy will continue to spiral downward, even with all these bailouts in place. In addition, the public is wise to the corrupt bankers’ game this time. The common man will undoubtedly demand a helicopter money bailout of his own.
I’m sure the Federal Reserve Board Members and Washington, D.C. politicians will resist this public groundswell at first. However, I’m equally certain that average citizens will be adamant that they should enjoy a turn at the money spigot this time. If the career politicians and bureaucrats refuse, then I believe we will be looking at another French Revolution: chaotic, bloody and violent.
I think the Powers That Be, fearing for their own safety, will ultimately relent and the helicopters will take flight over Main Street.
Helicopter money for the average citizen could assume several different forms. It could come via something as simple as a lump-sum, one-time check for each adult citizen. Or it could arrive as a rebate of FICA taxes paid over the last 5 or 10 years.
Universal Basic Income, or UBI, is another interesting possibility. This would be a small monthly income stream for life, very similar to Social Security. The only difference is that UBI would be paid to all adult citizens instead of just the elderly.
The final possibility for widespread helicopter money is a proposal by the iconoclast Australian economist Steve Keen. He believes that government should engage in a modern-day debt jubilee of sorts. This would involve the government mailing out big checks to everyone, but with a twist: your debts would be paid off first.
So if you had a mortgage for $100,000 and the bailout amount was $50,000, the government would send the $50k to your bank to pay down your mortgage. In other words, your mortgage would be cut in half. Even the payments would be halved, as it is probable that installment debt would be re-amortized after such an event. The only people who would receive helicopter money directly under Keen’s proposal would be those who had either no, or modest debts.
The primary benefit of the Keen proposal is that it would save our necrotic banking system – something that would appeal tremendously to our corrupt political overlords. This factor alone greatly boosts its chances of implementation.
Regardless of how it is deployed, all of this money printing is going to have a fundamentally different impact on the economy than the prior round did in 2008. Back then, the money was only dropped on Wall Street and it stayed there. This resulted in massive asset price inflation, but little consumer price inflation.
This time around, it is clear that any helicopter money that lands on Main Street will affect prices in the real economy. And this is the crux of my thesis.
From 2008 until 2019 we have been living through a stealth depression for the average person. Wages have been stagnant. Interest income has been nil. Good jobs and promotions have been hard to come by. Instead, all the perks from money printing went straight into the pockets of the large banks and other monopolistic corporations.
This had the effect of depressing the price of hard assets like antiques, gemstones, art and bullion. These asset classes were completely ignored by traditional asset managers who were too busy chasing stock and bond market bubbles to care.
The only exceptions to this rule were the very finest, most internationally-renowned gemstones and artworks, which sold for millions of dollars to the ultra-wealthy as trophies. Any hard asset selling for less than $30,000 or $40,000 wasn’t even considered fit to be an impulse purchase for the obscenely rich. And anything priced below $10,000 was simply irredeemably low-brow.
All of this will change when helicopter money is dropped onto Middle America during the next recession. Average people will rightly start looking for a way to protect their wealth. And neither stocks, nor bonds, nor cash will do the job this time. High-end antiques, precious gems, fine art and bullion will be the obvious safe havens in this scenario.
I don’t care whether you choose to sink your money into a relatively conservative hard asset, like pre-1933 semi-numismatic U.S. gold coins, or opt for something more unconventional, like vintage Must de Cartier wristwatches. But you absolutely must allocate a bare minimum of 5% to 10% (and preferably more) of your investment portfolio to tangible assets if you hope to preserve your purchasing power against the tidal wave of printed money that is coming.
It has been my longstanding prediction that the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet will balloon from its prior peak of $4.5 trillion to an astounding $20 trillion in the next recession. And unlike our last financial crisis, much of this freshly printed helicopter money will find its way into the hands of the middle class. This will naturally drive up both demand and prices for quality tangible assets. But it is vitally important that you act now before the freshly-printed money hits the economy. This will allow you to get into these intriguing unconventional assets for obscenely low prices before the crowd discovers them.
I was browsing Etsy the other day when I chanced upon a marvelous vintage hardwood box from the 1980s. The seller claimed that it was made from rosewood, a beautiful tropical wood that is highly desirable. However, I was skeptical of that attribution. The box simply didn’t look like any rosewood that I had ever encountered before.
Instead, the wood’s tight grain and deep chocolate brown color shimmered with the barest hint of purple. In addition, a thin strip of pale white sapwood splashed across the front edge of the box, creating a striking contrast with the nearly black heartwood.
After hours of research, I finally came to a revelation about the identity of my mystery wood. It was almost certainly African Blackwood, also known by its scientific name, Dalbergia melanoxylon, or locally in Africa as Mpingo.
African Blackwood is an exotic hardwood par excellence. It is not only extremely rare, but also incredibly dark in color – often bordering on completely black. Sometimes specimens are slightly lighter in color. In these instances, the lustrous black grain is subtly streaked with rich browns and traces of violet iridescence. The thin, yellowish-white sapwood is clearly demarcated from the dark heartwood – a visual characteristic that artistically-inclined woodworkers often exploit.
In addition to being stunningly attractive, African Blackwood also possesses amazing physical properties.
Foremost among these unique physical attributes is its incredibly high density. Dalbergia melanoxylon has a specific gravity of 1.27, or 1,270 kg/m3, which is absurdly high for timber. In fact, African Blackwood is the world’s third densest commercially available wood, only surpassed by Itin (aka “super-mesquite”) and Black Ironwood (the name is self-explanatory here). All of these woods will readily sink in water (specific gravity 1.00), which is quite unusual – almost all species of wood float once seasoned.
Although little known outside of woodworking circles, there is a direct relationship between the density of a wood and its hardness. The denser the wood, the harder it is. As a result, African Blackwood possesses legendary hardness. This is measured via the standardized Janka hardness scale, which quantifies the pounds of force necessary to embed a steel sphere measuring 0.444 inches in diameter halfway into a sample of wood.
African Blackwood scores a prodigious 3,670 lbf on the Janka hardness test, which puts supposedly hard woods like white oak (1,360 lbf) and rock maple (1,450 lbf) to shame. Even exotic tropical hardwoods such as Zebrawood (1,830 lbf), Santos Mahogany (2,400 lbf) and Cocobolo (2,960 lbf) can’t compare to the exceptional hardness of Dalbergia melanoxylon.
As a result of its extreme hardness, working with African Blackwood can be quite challenging. If you are lucky, it will blunt your very expensive woodworking tools. If you aren’t lucky, it will snap your favorite carbide drill bit in two like a twig. In fact, experienced woodworkers claim this difficult wood machines almost as if it was a metal.
This is both a blessing and a curse.
It is a curse for obvious reasons. Only the very hardest and toughest blades and bits will make any headway against the recalcitrant wood. And you should count on that hardware wearing at an accelerated rate. Even screws and nails must be religiously pre-drilled to have any hope of penetrating African Blackwood.
But this exotic hardwood’s famed hardness is an asset too, allowing it to hold any design detail marvelously well. African Blackwood can even be machined to hold threads – an attribute that helps make it a wonder-wood for wind instruments (more on that later).
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African Blackwood originates from the arid plains of sub-Saharan Africa, where it grows from Sudan and Ethiopia in the north to South Africa in the south. However, most commercial timber is harvested from two countries: Tanzania and Mozambique.
Dalbergia melanoxylon grows exceedingly slowly due to the harsh conditions of its native habitat. Approximately 60 to 70 years must elapse before a Mpingo tree can seriously be considered for logging. But the very best, darkest-colored wood only comes from much more mature trees that are at least 150 years old.
Despite its longevity, African Blackwood never grows particularly large or tall. Most adult specimens average between 20 and 30 feet (6 and 9 meters) tall, with a diameter that rarely exceeds 1 foot (0.3 meters). Exceptional examples can grow larger than these dimensions, but almost all of these old growth trees were harvested for their wood long ago.
African Blackwood is not an easy timber to wrestle from nature, even after a suitable specimen has been identified for logging. The pith in the center of the trees is often infested by ants, which deposit sand and dirt throughout the trunk. So in addition to being exceptionally hard, the trees are also riddled with silica and other equipment destroying abrasive minerals. As a result, an estimated 90% of the wood is lost as waste in the long and difficult milling process.
One of the most intriguing aspects of African Blackwood is its historical origins. For many thousands of years the glossy black timber has been intimately associated with ebony – that most desirable of dark woods.
This is particularly interesting because today ebony timber is considered to be exclusive to the Diospyros family of trees. This includes Gaboon Ebony (Diospyros crassiflora), Macassar Ebony (Diospyros celebica), Vietnamese Ebony (Diospyros mun) and Ceylon Ebony (Diospyros ebenum). In other words, the Diospyros family contains the “true” ebonies, while all other dark timber species are merely look-alikes.
There is only one potential exception to this iron-clad rule – African Blackwood.
You see, Dalbergia melanoxylon, while technically part of the rosewood genus of trees, is undoubtedly the “original” ebony of the ancient world. It was the lustrous black timber that the ancient Egyptian pharaohs ardently coveted so many thousands of years ago. They went to great lengths to obtain the precious material, which they used in fine furniture. In fact, an intact African Blackwood bed was found in the tomb of that most famous of Egyptian rulers, Tutankhamun.
Trade caravans imported the treasured timber into Egypt from the southern part of the African continent, many hundreds of miles away. It was often accompanied by other luxury goods from the same region, like gold, ivory, slaves and exotic animals. The Egyptians called the prized wood “hbny”, which has become our modern-day ebony – one of the few ancient Egyptian loan-words to be adopted directly into modern English.
African Blackwood is also mentioned in the Bible. The Old Testament book of Ezekiel (27:15) states that: “The men of Rhodes traded with you, and many coastlands were your customers; they paid you with ivory tusks and ebony.” This was purportedly written by the prophet Ezekiel during his exile in Babylon between 593 and 571 BC, proving that Dalbergia melanoxylon was prized throughout the ancient world long before the modern-day ebonies of the Diopyros genus graduated to universal fame.
As an aside, it is obvious that the concept of “ebony and ivory” has been with us from the very dawn of human history. This is no doubt due to the fact that they are both found in the same geographic area – the African savanna. Ebony and ivory were the peanut butter and chocolate of ancient luxury materials. Ivory’s creamy off-white color contrasted beautifully with the glossy darkness of African Blackwood, making the pair a favorite of ancient royalty.
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Today, African Blackwood is used for a number of high-end items, including musical instruments, decorative inlays and turned objects.
Due to its high density and excellent dimensional stability, Dalbergia melanoxylon is a superb tonewood. The world’s very finest clarinets, oboes, flutes, bassoons, piccolos and bagpipes have traditionally been crafted from this rare and unique wood. According to the respected flute-maker Casey Burns, “African Blackwood, which makes an excellent flute, is now the standard by which all other flute tonewoods are judged.”
Even some high-end guitars have been painstakingly hand-crafted from African Blackwood. Unfortunately, due to the tree’s small size it is exceedingly difficult to get material large enough to fabricate complete guitars from. Instead, it is more common for guitar-makers to opportunistically add fingerboards, bridges and other small parts from this superlative acoustic wood. It is a pity that African Blackwood guitars are so difficult to come by, as many experienced musicians and luthiers consider them to be the equal of that tonewood legend, Brazilian Rosewood.
Predictably, instrument grade Mpingo timber – nearly jet black wood from the very oldest trees – is in extraordinarily high demand. Prices can range from $10,000 to $20,000 per cubic meter of instrument grade material, depending on the vagaries of the market. This makes it one of the most expensive woods on the planet.
Because it is an excellent turning wood, costly objects d’art and small carvings are often sculpted from this most desirable of exotic woods. Other items made from Dalbergia melanoxylon include custom knife and gun handles, smoking pipes, fountain pen bodies, duck calls and chess sets. It is also coveted for marquetry and inlay in premium furniture.
Interestingly, African Blackwood is also frequently used as firewood in its native territories. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but Mpingo trees are actually quite widespread across their indigenous range. Furthermore, few trees are large enough to harvest for their timber and the wood is naturally imbued with a high oil content. As a result, Dalbergia melanoxylon is an outstanding firewood species. In fact, it has been said that fires fueled with Mpingo wood burn so hot that cooking utensils sometimes melt in them!
We are currently sitting at a unique historical junction regarding exotic hardwood timber. This is particularly the case when examining supply-demand dynamics for African Blackwood. The founder of Taylor Guitars, Bob Taylor, had this to say about its sister wood, ebony:
“Ebony has been a wood that for two or three or four hundred years we’ve gone into countries and we’ve used the ebony until it’s all gone – literally. Then we move into another country and we take their ebony until it’s all gone.”
Many of the sentiments that Bob Taylor conveys about ebony also apply to African Blackwood, albeit to a lesser extent. While it is in no danger of extinction, commercially viable timber supplies are getting thin on the ground.
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For thousands of years the native African population was so small that any lumber harvesting was inherently sustainable. Then an African population and infrastructure explosion during the 20th century granted us a relatively brief period of abundant exotic hardwood supply. But this short-lived historical anomaly is rapidly coming to an close.
The consequences are predictable. High quality African Blackwood lumber was readily available until the early 2000s. But this abundance was illusory. In reality, the old growth Mpingo trees were being systematically over-harvested in order to feed the insatiable demand for this most compelling of exotic woods.
The inevitable finally occurred on January 2, 2017. That is when the entirety of the Dalbergia genus – including African Blackwood – was added to the CITES treaty (Appendix II) governing international trade in threatened species. I’ve written about this topic previously in an article on Brazilian Rosewood, the most famous member of the Dalbergia family.
As a Cites Appendix II listed species, Dalbergia melanoxylon requires an export permit before it can cross international boundaries for commercial purposes. Happily for professional musicians wanting to perform in a foreign country with an African Blackwood instrument, there is a non-commercial exemption up to 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Additionally, any existing Dalbergia melanoxylon item or raw wood is grandfathered into the system, making it perfectly legal to own, buy or sell – provided it does not cross an international border.
African Blackwood is a unique and desirable wood in a world where few things feel truly original anymore. Its seductively dark color tantalizes with whispers of chocolate and purple – an exotic hardwood without equal. Is it really any surprise that the ebony of the ancients has captivated mankind since the time of the Egyptian pharaohs?