TomGoodheart

LOL I miss the old days when we all knew how many groats to the pint, measured cricket pitches in Avoirdupois and gross meant a dozen dozen, not horrid! It's not surprising that kids nowadays have difficulty working out how many units of alcohol they've drunk, they can't bloody count without an iphone. And while I'm on the subject, whatever happened to those five men that used to fill baths so we could work out the lengths of their trousers or something? I guess they got laid off with the miners or something ... fings just ain't wot they used to be, are they?

Hi and welcome Stuart. The problem with your question is that different auction houses will have different advantages and disadvantages. Spink or Bonhams have international presence that London Coins or Lockdales might not command. The sorts of coins you're presenting will also be a factor. Are we talking hammered? Early milled? Modern? Some auction houses sell £1M coins in one auction. Others will be lucky to do that in a year, so if you're aiming to offload £40-£60K of coins a year you'll need to be sure your market can bear it. You'll perhaps have seen from tv shows like Cash in the Attic, Bargain Hunt and so on that auctions can have off days too! Sometimes you'll get little interest, but on others two buyers can send prices sky high! And of course, there's the sellers' fees to pay. Remember hammer price is before deducting commission plus possibly photography fees and other little extras that can get sneaked in (and VAT of course!) There are other ways to sell. For example most dealers will sell on your behalf, either buying a collection or selling on commission. If your dealer specialises in the types of coins you have, this could prove a better outlet. But dealers can take time to turn around stock, sometimes retaining coins for years before they sell. As for slabbed coins, that also depends on your market. Most collectors here in the UK are just not bothered and many will buy with the intention of breaking the slab if they want the coin. Americans on the other hand appear to buy the slab and it's questionable how much attention they pay to the coin! In which case, who has slabbed and graded your coin will be a factor, some companies having a better reputation than others or being better known. And if your coins aren't already slabbed, you'll need to pay to have them entombed. A bit pointless if they are just going to get broken out again! It would help if you can give us an idea of what coins you intend to sell, maybe a photo or two to establish grade (as "High" can be meaningful, or not, depending on the accuracy of the grading!) and number. For example the advice concerning selling ten coins for £1000 each will be different from if you want to sell 100 at £100 each! And of course, I'm curious where these coins are coming from. If a large old collection then the advice will be very different from if you intend to buy your stock specifically to auction it!

It's a Russian 2 Kopek coin. Not sure what mint or value I'm afraid. Compare with this: 2 Kopek .

Mmm .. I was staying out of the predicting because I didn't have much more to add. However I have just received (as no doubt, a few of you will have done) an email from CNG concerning the possible restrictions on the import of Bulgarian coins to the US. Now why should that matter you might wonder, but of course Bulgarian doesn't just include recent issues and ebay fakes, but also incorporates parts of the Ottoman and Byzantine empires, coins of Thrace, Eastern parts of the Roman Empire, coins of the Emperor Constantine and of Alexander the Great to mention but a few. If significant swathes of the ancient and medieval numismatic world start to close up to collectors, where will their interests turn? Perhaps to the 'Old World' and the parts of Europe that are not so strongly enforcing the the International Cultural Property Protection programme? To England and it's rich heritage of relatively cheap, accessible and historically interesting coins? I wonder.

Oh, it's possible Geoff. Whether the grade is significant in this case ... that's another matter. I tend to use the 'old' style descriptions. Spink for example call Fine as "Showing quite a lot of wear but still with design and legends distinguishable". Doyle & Finn "a worn coin: most of the detail of the design will have worn away or be fading, nevertheless the main features will still be quite bold and clear" So Fine seems about right to me. But sometimes the actual grade is rather less important than the question of whether you will ever find a better one, isn't it?

One of the most useful sites I have found is (was) CoinArchives where you could search and view archived auction data going back years. Unfortunately they now charge and while the cost may be reasonable for an auction house or major dealer, I am not going (or able) to pay US$600 (443 €) a year for the pleasure. For someone like me, while I take my collecting very seriously, the cost would need to be minimal to be attractive, whatever type of gadget (yes, I'm showing my age!) it's aimed at.

??? I must get my eyes tested. I'm sure it says EDWARDVS VIII, but all I can see is GEORGIVS VI. Or perhaps it's the wrong photo?

OK. I'm just ... bemused. Does anyone know (or can anyone think) what on earth buyers of WRL replica coins actually do with their purchases when they have spent this sort of money? OLD COIN NEWARK 1646 HALFCROWN CHARLES 1 DIAMOND SHAPE Any sensible dealer will just sympathise (or laugh) so the only way to get the damned things off your hands would be to go back to ebay or whereever and keep your fingers crossed another idiot is prepared to pay. But do people really expact to get a genuine coin from this sort of listing???

When new coins are just issued or if I find a circulating older one in particularly excellent condition I put it aside, but only ever one because generally speaking they are only of interest to me! To anyone else they are worth no more than face value. That isn't likely to change in the next half century, whatever people think about the Darwin £2 coins! Counterfeits are of a different interest. The earliest fake £1 coin I have is dated 1989 and is made of lead that has been painted gold! A truly wonderful example. To me that is. To anyone else it's pretty much worthless .. or less, since it would be retained by any bank and you wouldn't get back the quid. There is also the fact that strictly speaking it's illegal to retain such things (counterfeits of circulating currency). I was tempted to keep one of the two fake £20 notes I received a while back (in the Post Office!) just out of interest, but I was collecting someone else's money so pointed it out to them and they exchanged them for proper ones. So if your £5 is fake Boomstick, then by all means keep it out of interest. Just remember it'd be illegal to try to sell it so the 'value' is questionable. Plus there's always the grey area of once we know a coin is fake we could be accused of .. whatever the relevant crime is. So really it's just that such things have historical interest from the point that counterfeits have been made ever since coins were struck. As to confused question, a pic would help. But quality control for currency coins isn't great at the Mint and it may be a simple manufacturing weakness; never going to be worth that much to the vast majority of collectors I'm afraid.

Nice Wolsey groat Geoff. A little brother for the Tournai!

Well, that was Colin Cooke / Neil Paisley's ID and it was a farthing, so ...

And while I'm on a roll, what do people think of this? 1741 George II Shilling EF 70. CGS 2nd Finest Known. EF? Personally (and remember I'm not a milled collector) I find the reverse a bit disappointing in that the wear seems a bit more than 'only evident on very close scrutiny' (Spink). Acceptable grade or not? (And yes, I did search for 'finest known' on ebay, just to see what came up!)

Roll up! Roll up! Finest nown evvah! OK, it's a perfectly good coin. But it's another example of someone getting carried away with slab grading. The fact is that the coin seems to have adjustment marks (or scrapes) and to my eyes isn't nearly as nice as the, albeit pricier, example sold by Stacks in 2008. 1688 Crown on ebay Bottom line is that population reports are pretty meaningless at this sort of level. If only a handful of coins have been graded and slabbed then 'finest known' means nothing. Be interesting to see if it sells given high BIN prices seem to be less succesful than letting a coin find it's own level, but that US buyers do seem to like the reassurance of a slabbed coin.

LOL I don't make the national average, so unless my salary almost doubles I don't need to worry too much about 40% I'm not sure an accountant could save me as much as I'd need to pay them!

Thanks GC. Good to see you here again!

I saw you wanted Chas 1st shillings.I noticed a few in an auction here in Australia in Sydney on Fri 21st Oct.Whether they are cheap or not you will have to decide.Lots 7948,9 & 7950 Elizabeth 1,lots 7955,6 & 7960 James 1,Lots 7967,8,9,70,71 Chas 1.You should find them at http://www.statusint.com Thanks! Not an auction house I'd heard of, so useful to have the link. I'd say the reserves are a little optomisitc, but then they might sell at that.

Oh, I accept what you say. But my feeling is that specially minted coins were meant to be admired as presentation pieces or kept as examples for archiving and study. While they can be spent as regular coinage, I don't believe that was what they were created for. Hence the distinction. Connecting them with modern tat was I guess just Cabernet Sauvignon driven hyperbole! Yeah, laik. Dem youff wot haz no jobs an is on benefits, Dey don pay no tax does em? (Sadly I haz no street cred an carn't keep up wit de chavese, elsin I'd be payin no taxis eeVah, no wot Ah mean?)

As Rob suggests, knowledge is power. When I bought my most expensive shilling the Spink price was £1250 in VF. But I knew that there were only four known examples and so the price hadn't been updated for who knows how long because none had appeared on the market. I also knew that none of the examples was much better than VF and so an example only marginally worse than the Brooker (Burstall, Lockett, Morrieson, Wheeler, Carlyon-Britton) coin was likely as good as I'd get, despite a grade of nVF. Presumably the published price put a few people off going too high (the estimate was £1800-£2200), but since so few examples are likely to come on the market I bid what I could afford. When I consider the price of Newark coins and how many there are of the darned things (not that number necessarily affects the value, but I think if it was just about scarcity they are way overpriced) and that I paid some £600 less than my bid, I reckon I bought cheap.

Old (or ancient by US standards!) coins are to me like antique furniture. While I want the essential detail I expect a bit of wear, a degree of patina from handling .. character in other words. To me MS70s are uninteresting. I'm sure it would be possible to strike as many as you want if you used special dies and care, but what's the point? To just stick it in a slab so it sparkles just like it did on day #1? That's not a coin to me. A coin is something that is intended to be used to buy things; to circulate in other words. All those other things, proofs, fine work pieces, perfect slabbed coins, they are little different from medallions or all those stupid commemorative things like 'London Mint' or 'Westminster Coins' you see on ebay. As Rob says, there's a problem with slabbing in that it does set a psychological minimum price, at least in the US. As a result I've seen the same coin doing the rounds from Goldbergs to Sacks back to Goldbergs and I suspect never actually owned by an individual, just passed from one auction to another in search of a buyer .. because it is just priced to high. I doubt that's the only one either. It would be interesting to see if any of these offerings end up slabbed, because in my experience American grading is rarely an accurate reflection of my assessment of a coin, being lower. Whether there are enough savvy American buyers to realise that a much better than average coin might only be graded VF-30 remains to be seen. But as for the demand for better hammered pieces, they are always much scarcer than the ordinary grades and those with a nice provenance will of necessity be very limited and desired. Time will tell whether the US market gets that or if grade continues to drive prices with anything less than EF being much less marketable, however rare.

"IN DISPLAYED ONLY, WONDERFUL CONDITION" is a new grade to me. Persumably that's what Americans would call XF-3 ?

One of these. A Charles I shilling, Sharp D2/2. While Spink list S2790 as D1-3/2 I'm not aware anyone has ever seen the second bust with that reverse even though examples exist with bust 1 (6) and 3(2) so odds on some coins were struck ...

Well, seeing as we all like looking at coins I see no reason you can't choose more than one Colin. Though I wouldn't bend them if I were you. They're a real pain to straighten again!

Very nice. And unusual, that size. Mine are all much smaller. Oh, and I just spotted one of my previous coins listed by a US auction house. Not sure if I'm more upset by the price they got for it, or the rather garish toning it seems to have developed!

I have a few spare pre-1947 silver coins. I'd accept £30/g for them to be melted.

Gosh, yes. I'd pay to slab a valuble coin too ...