Rob

I won the first of the Irish gunmoney crowns, lot 1279. The estimate was a low 100-150, but of the two main protagonists that have pushed up Irish prices in the past few years, one has gone through a divorce, so coins must be sold and it's doubles all round. £220 hammer was a bargain.

WALLIS, D Collection of British milled coins sold at DNW on 30th September 2009.

JOYNER, J T Collection of hammered from early Anglo-Saxon through to Stuart sold by DNW on 4th December 2013. White card.

COMBER, C Chris Comber is a specialist in Tudor Coinage and a co-author of the standard Elizabeth I reference. The ticket has obviously been trimmed to fit into a tray hole.

CUMMINGS, J John Cummings is a dealer of predominantly ancients and early coinage. Off-white card.

LINGFORD, H M H M Lingford d.1950, a huge collection, much of which was acquired from Baldwin and who puchased the collection post-mortem. Tickets of various size but all the same basic layout.

Looks like it.

MARTIN M Private collector, a specialist in Soho coinage. White card.

DENNIS DUNKERTON (dealer) Square yellowish cream card.

BOYD, W C Collection sold at Baldwin, 26/9/2005, having lain undisturbed for 99 years.The catalogue includes pictures of a number of tickets written by Boyd in the introduction. Assuming they are to scale, diameters are 1" for the small ones, and 1.5" for the large.

Personally, I would set the lower/upper estimates to 60/80% of perceived market value (book) and let it go from there. With the juice, that would put upper estimate at around book price. Baldwins made a fundamental mistake in my view of setting the lower estimate at 20% below book because it meant that to get something at 'fair value', whatever that means, you would have to be opening bidder. Any more and you would be paying over the odds. Using my estimates, 150-200 would imply a value of 250. There are a lot of people willing to go twice book - we've all done that, and quite a few prepared to go higher still, so is it necessarily that high? After all, who is to say that the book adequately reflects demand. People seem anxious to point out when Spink book prices are too high, but omit to mention those that are too low compared to what people are prepared to pay, and are paying. Ultimately though, what something ends up at is outside the control of the auctioneer. Since the millennium there has been a huge increase in the number of collectors and investors which has fuelled steep rises in the finite number of coins available. You can triple the number of collectors, but the number of desirable coins remains broadly the same. Sure the detectorists are excavating large numbers of coins, but these are mostly undesirable in collector terms with large numbers being fragments or otherwise damaged. Hobson's Choice is another matter, but that is rarely the case.

You have a choice. You can either set the estimate so that an opening bid which is 20% below market value becomes market value with the juice - and you get no competitive bidding. Or the estimate can be low which will entice people to bid competitively. You can also set the estimate above market value and will have to if the vendor has too high a reserve on it. Then you rely on a fool and their money to sell the lot, unless it is an unrecognised variety noticed by 2 specialists.

And as St. James's, Baldwins, Morton & Eden...... Blame it on London. It is and has always been expensive to base yourself there. All things numismatic cost several times what they do elsewhere. Take a coin fair in say Bloomsbury. The cost of a table is over 5x that of one at Wakefield, but I bet I wouldn't do 5x the business if I attended, and that loss would be compounded by having to park and stay in a hotel. There's nothing cheap or cheerful about London which is best avoided. In the case of auctions you can thankfully bid from your armchair, but the ability to view the lots beforehand has effectively been blocked for anyone living outside London. DNW used to be good as you could arrive at 8 o'clock and look at your lots in advance of the sale which was across the road. Now you have to do this in advance. Spink have always required viewing to be prior to the day of the sale and when I went to DNW in June to view, I called in at BSJ only to be told the lots wouldn't be ready until the day before the sale. What a waste of time.

Misc Amounts are the few itemised things below the lots won (surcharges, insurance and post), and these are VAT liable items. VAT is 20% and has been since 2011.

Depends on what you bought. 20% + VAT is the norm, but if it was an import from outside the EU then an additional 5% import VAT is applied and is identified by an x by the lot number. Which lot(s) are we talking about?

You don't, but it would be out of character for them to fiddle the bids. If you listen to the commentary during the auction, they are quite open about conflicting bids and opening prices, also if there is a reserve they will say we need to start at such an amount. You also see the bids as they come in. Arguably someone could be bidding up their own item just as some do on eBay, but in this case wouldn't have the getout feature of eBay whereby you can make a second chance offer, so personally I wouldn't worry. The market is quite competitive and savvy. Enough people know the market value of something to say that many things will reach fair value.

I have always thought it was 1 over inverted 1. From your picture it looks as if the first 2 digits have been re-entered which would be consistent with an Arabic 1.

The original manufacturer of the copies wasn't trying to pass them off as genuine. Things should be marked as copies or some otherwise identifiable mark to prevent precisely what is happening on eBay. It doesn't matter what the mark is as long as you can identify the real from the copy. There are clearly unscrupulous people who are also serious collectors. The last LC auction had one of the Charles I shillings of which I have the original (lot 1735). This was withdrawn because I picked up on it. Having pointed out the identifiying characteristics in a Spink Circular article eight or nine years ago, this last example was conveniently 'chipped' below the bust at the place where the join can be seen.

Not that I am aware.

Possibly. Depends on what you want. Certainly some rare ones, even unique. They will all appear at some point, but I've no idea on the order in which the collection will be dispersed. The first bit was a little disjointed to my mind. The Richard III halfgroat stood in splendid isolation but I suppose the Civil War things were ok. 8 Exeter crowns out of the 33 die pairs known is probably about right, but they could have included some more Tower silver and a bit of Henry VI wouldn't have gone amiss along with Civil War York and W/SA which could get a bit congested if they aren't careful.

Leaving aside the milled which he collected mostly in the 1940s, the main part of the collection must have a few thousand hammered coins. His wants list was only on six sides of paper - not quite on a postage stamp, but nearly so. He was certainly one of the last people to collect so widely because it is just not feasible today with prices being what they are. He was paying a few times face for his milled coins during WW2, something today's collectors can only dream about. A coin costing a couple shillings then is a hundred quid today.

Nothing for you Eric. John Hulett's collection. Mostly not high grade, but some wonderful rarities to be had. They say the collection will be in 6 parts, but I would have thought it should be more like 12 because of the large numbers of coins. He will be sorely missed. Someone who had all the time in the world for you if you wanted to discuss coins. It was a standing joke between me and another that he not only knew the name of the bloke who carried a set of dies from one place to another, but also knew the name of his horse. He had a huge amount of knowledge which he freely shared. He was also happy for you to take pictures of anything you needed for research. I used to call in regularly when passing because there was always so much to learn.

DNW is going to be an ongoing project for all this year and next.

All that's missing is counterfeit Newark Siege Piece dated 1677.

I know now. I misread it.