Rob

Or even this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yue6Cb5OULM or this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzU2owPegHE

This is more subjective than grading! Everything depends on the mood. This. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7VHRyQDMTM or perhaps this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHhrZgojY1Q

On a maintenance grant between £400 - £500 per annum?? It's the same as it's always been. Usefulness doesn't have a unit cost. If you need it, sort it out. Usefulness may not have a unit cost, but if a book costs over 1/8 of your total annual income, it's just not possible economically. Saving for a rainy day? Or thinking ahead as to future expenditure? i.e. not p***ing all your income against the wall. Getting a job in the summer before uni, and every holiday between terms? OK, in my case, my parents and relations always made money available for education, but I still had to save every penny up from any income earned to buy the bike because they refused point blank to contribute.

London Coins do have some things from time to time which give you reason to push the boat out. GC commented to me a few years ago that he was taken aback by the price paid for my Cromwell shilling in the Andrew Wayne sale when he discovered I had bought it. That from someone who isn't afraid to keep going and frequently has a defective stop button. Conversely, I wish my button didn't work so well, as I'm still trying to find a gothic florin to replace a really juicy PCGS MS65 1856 that went through London Coins a few years ago. Silly sod that I am, stopped bidding.

I concur that the premium placed on a slabbed coin is not value for money, but the fallibility of the TPGs is well worth the discount generated by misattribution/bad grading etc. Nobody is forced to buy a coin, raw or slabbed. That people choose to do so is entirely their perogative. Disregard the overgraded coin in the slab with the wrong label just as you would a typical eBay listing. Relatively very few coins are rare such that you can't find another somewhere else. If it happens to be the only example extant you are unlikely to be the only one chasing it whether raw or slabbed. No one system wins hands down, both have their strengths and weaknesses. Play these off according to the individual situation. For example, one day I would like a Peck 1983, but I've never seen one and don't know of any free-range examples.

So long as you maintain a bit of discipline, it doesn't matter what the estimate is. Decide how much you want to bid and go with it. Anyone complaining after the event that the estimate was misleading hasn't got a handle on the market, and arguably shouldn't be bidding at all.

On a maintenance grant between £400 - £500 per annum?? It's the same as it's always been. Usefulness doesn't have a unit cost. If you need it, sort it out.

It isn't a coin, rather some kind of token or medallet. Toy money possibly given the similarity of reverse deisn to that of a crown and halfcrown? What's the diameter?

Complications here. How many John Springs do you want? Totally different John Spring. This one also lives in the London area and sells catalogues Tried to do a multi-quote but it failed. On the question of price, £60 is not a huge amount for a reference book. I was paying that sort of money for some books at university in the 70s, and there were far more printed than is likely for a specialist coin related book. Even at school earlier in the decade, the biology textbook for A level cost £30 - or about the same as a lesser quality first generation scientific calculator. M&R used to cost about £40-45, but is now out of print.

With the new feedback system it'll be nigh on impossible to email the buyer. Which is just what eBay wants. Being able to tell buyers that they have bought a forgery, means that they will return it to the seller and eBay lose the commission on the sale. Ebay's motive for the obscured feedback system is clear. Not totally convinced by this argument. Whilst eBay are not going to give up commission willingly, the number of forgeries sold on ebay is only a miniscule fraction of the total sales. Far more likely that they are trying to eliminate a source of potential hassle. To sort out complaints requires time and manpower, the cost of which far outweighs any benefits accruing to eBay.

link Presumably was able to outwit the guards and escape from the local asylum? There are some damned clever coins around. A few months ago we had one taking a dog for a walk.

This is obviously contemporary packaging, but I've no idea where they came from. Anybody?

I assume that most are going to be worn nearly flat, so by and large they will be worth nothing to very little and most would be best scrapped. (I have 25kgs here waiting to go in the pot which are too much hassle to sort for no sensible return) Key dates are 1864, 1869 & 1871. There are rare varieties of some years which by definition most can't have, but these are often difficult to identify because of the condition. Exceptions are things like narrow and wide dates. So the 1877 narrow date is easy to spot, but so rare you are very unlikely to have one. The wife stuck a low grade 1864 on ebay a while back which sold for just over £1, so unless in good grade is unlikely to produce a worthwhile return irrespective of rarity. Your call depending on how much time you have to waste.

The ticket doesn't look like it is in Whitton's hand. The attached is the 'Cost me' column from the catalogue of his own sale in 1943. The lower case m is distinctly different as is the 2. It isn't the ticket style used in the 1959 sale via Seaby. I have a coin from this and will see if the ticket is imaged anywhere.

Struggling here. There aren't many sceptre shillings listed. 1949 and the surrounding years saw two examples which appear to have stayed in the trays for a while. One less than fine for 8/- to 10/6 and a gFine to nVF at 21/-. However, neither had stock numbers that were remotely like the above. TBH, without knowing what the coin was and its grade, there's a fair amount of p***ing in the wind. Fair Tower shillings were still selling for 6/- in 1960, so it could be any time over a 20 year period. Unfortunately I'm missing 2 issues in the 1940-1960 period, so a complete check wasn't possible. Sorry.

It looks like a Seaby ticket from when RCB's collection was dispersed post-mortem. I'll have a look a bit later.

It's the only bit they needed to fill in. With die corrections, however well it gets filled there is almost invariably a shadow of the filled digit if in high grade. The filler sometimes falls out too, so you see a 'flaw' where this happened. Sometimes they don't bother filling in the previous digit if it is similar enough to the new one, such as converting a 5 to a 6, or say G1/G2 coppers where the font used enables a 2 to be superimposed on a 1 with minimal evidence. At this point you need a high grade coin to look at the relief to establish if it has been recut.

I can't see any trace of a 7

Why? There's no mention of collection in person only. They have a postal service too.

Thanks Rob, postie's just delivered it Great. Thanks I had 2 copies if anyone else is looking for one.

Large boxful just arrived. Please PM if anyone is interested. I haven't sorted a list out yet, so you would be asking for specifics probably. Plenty of other books and catalogues too. 2 car loads in total!

I don't think anyone will argue with that. The question is how?

That is the kind of uncertainty I want to avoid. I need reproducable and stable results under constantly the same conditions in order to have the possibility to compare. The easiest and cheapest way to achieve that is a scanner I only had to find a setup that I like once. I now use the same setup for all coin images and therefore have reproducible and comparable results. How do you cope with differences in toning? Some can be nearly black, whereas others have none.

Finally, this is a camera image of the second coin. http://www.rpcoins.co.uk/c15%20pics/01857.jpg

This is a regular currency strike of the same type.