Leaderboard

Talking of what was, and was not released into circulation , during the war my mother picked up in change a brass 3d piece, which to her was just a 3d bit to spend ,she at that time had absolutely no thoughts at all of coin collecting , as after all there was a war on and she was a teenager with thoughts only of spending money . Anyway, she just glancing at the coin and noticed that the tails side was different to the normal 3d, being as she said, different with more of a stylised design than normal , but then gave the coin no more thought, and passed it to the bus conductor to pay for her fare . Well, many years later , after starting to collect coins, she found out about the Edward viii 3d piece with the stylised reverse, and knew that was what she had held in her hand all those years before , she felt sick, thinking if only I had known of there existence at the time, and if only she had turned the coin over she might have noticed that it was an Edward viii 3d, and not the George vi . I believe these were all pattern coins, and were not supposed to be released into circulation. God knows what there worth today, maybe one of you on here has one , let us know. It makes me wonder what may have passed through my hands without my knowing about its rarity . Terry

Obv.

I guess we are all completionists, as much as it's possible to be, depending mostly on the extent of our collecting parameters. When coming to the end of a 'basic' run of Freeman pennies, I'm guessing there'd likely be a temptation to expand it further into the more recently published micro-varieties? Equally, one might opt for the pleasure of closing a lid on something, and beginning instead a new Davies run of shillings? It's human nature, particular the nature of males, to want orderly boxes, for everything, so a micro-varietal penny collector is no less diseased (well, maybe, lol) than the collector who 'closes the lid' on a simpler Type Set, only to immediately open the lid on a new box. We just keep going on, for as long as we can suffer the tension that an open-lid box delivers upon our delicate little male brains (and the delicate little brains of some very strange females too, of course ).

On the face of it I can understand you feeling that the number of teeth/beads is insignificant ,as it shows little on the overall appearance of the coin , but that's not the whole story. Taking Pre-Decimal bronze pennies,[ my passion ], in the 107 years of mass production of circulation type dies, there were only 19 obverse, and 13 reverse pennies with differing numbers of teeth/beads. [as yet found] . Usually the number of teeth/beads changed with the changing of the image or font . But not always . In some years, notable 1860 1874 1908 1911 and others multiple changes were made to the number of teeth/beads with little change to the image or font. This would suggest that The Mint was trying out different dies for the next generation of pennies, and with only small amounts of them being released into circulation. It follows that most of the one year only tooth/bead die types are scarce or rare. This obviously is a minimal visual change, but significant in terms of the sequence of the dies used. These changes were deliberate ,and not made by error or chance, so must be part of the Historical sequence of die experimentation in coin production at the Mint. Terry

The old head florins are beautiful, not sure they achieve 'iconic' status that's all, for me!