Rob

Not the only dodgy goings on. I 'won' lot 1093 in the last BSJ sale with a hammer price of £370. Prices realised now show a hammer price of £410, i.e. £10 above my max. It will be interesting to see where it reappears, as the buyer is presumably able to outbid you after the auction.

Sorry, just wondered if it was a social media auto-pilot thing.i.e. people just use it because they use it elsewhere, or whether it actually provided a function. No idea if it generates a notification. I've seen a few @Robs before but never received anything in my inbox, so would think not.

After nearly 70 years I would hesitate to say with certainty if any crown was in its original box. You have a load of crowns and you have a pile of boxes, then you find a box to match the state of the coin. The only ones virtually guaranteed to be original are those that have never changed hands.

I was querying what the @coincat is for. Isn't an at sign something to do with twitter? - which is nothing to do with this forum.

Not only that, but they would likely have used the minimum force to give an acceptable result to minimise stress on the presses. A breakdown would not be good.

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A picture would be good. However, this series is riddled with recut letters/missing serifs etc, so much so that finding an example with well struck perfect letters is quite a difficult task.

I have two lying in front of me as I read this and it's one of each. I was wondering if one is a 'problem' with the reducing machine, or alternatively, given the variation in the end of the horse's tail, that could be down to how much the die is polished. A third possibility is whether one type was made at the Festival of Britain and the other at the mint. Dave Groom also noted in his book that a larger space before FLORET had been reported. Again, these two here are one of each. This must be due to different collars being used.

Here we have an object lesson in what not to do with a coin, which seriously p's me off makes me livid. First of all we have a pleasantly toned coin, a P2103 (dies 2+A) struck in silver with extensive rust spots to neck that had a decent provenance: T Bliss 653c, Sotheby 16/5/1916 V M Brand E M H Norweb 646, SCA 48 13/11/1985 P PAS 11.34g SCA 207 23/3/2011, lot 700 P DNW 183 lot 184, 8/4/2020 P NOW DIPPED and identifiable only by the tiny rim marks. Someone should be ashamed of themselves. Better still, if you want to play with dipping solution then use the change in your pocket. How to destroy value in one deft dip - take something that oozes character and can be chased back through previous catalogue images with provenance given and then transform it into a featureless landscape. There was no mention of the Norweb envelope in the DNW catalogue, so that's probably lost along with the provenance too. I despair. Two cheers for knocking a third off the value. £900 hammer for something that would go for in excess of 1500 all in under current market conditions is not a good result.

As you are aware, I like provenances. To this end I have a database which I regularly expand with a view to establishing which are the best available examples of a particular type so that when I am looking to purchase an example I know with a good deal of certainty that I am unlikely to find better, or only marginally so, thus negating any further upgrade. Patterns lend themselves to this because they are relatively few in number, so Moore patterns for example have between 100 and 150 known for all types which makes it an easy series to analyse. This coin being one of 4 examples of P2103 I have traced had the best provenance by a country mile, going back to less than 30 years after it was struck. This was due to Norweb recording the provenance she obtained from Brand, who did the same. Prior to the last 20 or 30 years it was normal for these never to be illustrated or assigned a provenance, usually being made up into bulk lots with similar types if there was more than one example in a collection, so any provenance is a bonus. So in answer, no it wasn't random. By doing due diligence, it should be possible for me to get an example of the four states of the laureate obverse die, each coupled with a different example of the four reverses (any combo will do), each in a different metal (silver, gilt, white metal and bronzed), which in conjunction with the coronet head P2135 which is only in copper will therefore provide a complete potted history of Moore's pattern pennies (excluding models). The only thing to add to this will be the tin uniface in my possession which was done from an unfinished reworked die that was previously the P2135 obverse, but which disintegrated. It suits my eclectic collecting habits. The description by Peck for this series also sits at odds with the evidence on the coins, so I am in the process of rewriting this section with a view to an article.

Edit to add, it sold for £1400 hammer in 2011, so someone might just have learned something.

I believe 2020 has finally seen Trump's cov[id]f[re]ef[re]e text clarified. You couldn't make it up.

It's a lottery, as it always has been. Don't believe all that is written. Coins in plastic or without are are all subject to the same rules. That was just an observation as to why slabbed coins could reasonably still attract import duty even if the 'Made in Britain' bit applied to the contents.

'Fraid you do. Anyway, the plastic bit would be an import. I also think they should be treated as returned goods, but can see it might be difficult to prove they were exported from here, not to mention actually made here in some cases.

Only one question. Why did someone go to the trouble of plugging it?

Who promoted you to pedant in chief? Peck's still in office as far as I am aware.

No it's a comparison of equals. We're all nerdy types, just our subject matter is different. Typically, when someone visits the table and asks if you have a particular type of coin, you point out the desirability of a particular variety at which point most shrug their shoulders and tell you they are just looking for a cheap, decent basic example. Maybe 10-20% are looking for the more esoteric.

Pricing has always been an issue, whatever the publication. All people need is an easy to use list for reference and a feel for how much they should pay based on what the market does, not what a price guide compiler thinks. Making your own list and noting the prices paid for the outliers is probably the best way to do it. You don't need, and it doesn't matter whether one guide says £2 each and the other says £4 if it's a commonly available coin. Just look what people are charging on lists, at coin fairs and wherever else you can glean information, then absorb the info and go shopping. Don't forget typos can also throw the market. Last year's CoE had a typo for the 1887 YH halfcrown UNC price, giving EF at 300 and UNC at 350 instead of 850. All the other UNC prices are in the 600-900 range which is roughly where the market is. Consequently I've had more than the odd offer from potential buyers to purchase the one I have listed at a more realistic 300 because this is in line with the book (despite being a better date). So people do pay attention to what is written, but clearly give it little thought.

If it's not in a widely read publication, nobody cares because they don't know about it. If it is published in a reference with a good reach, everybody has one and describes the coin to maximise returns. The collecting interest however is mostly limited to nerdy types and because we all live in our own little bubble, we fail to appreciate that a majority of collectors are overcome with indifference when it comes to micro-varieties. The best you can usually hope for in a description is an overdate, legend variety or anything else that's obvious.

That's the 2021 book which is not out yet and will be available from the 31st December according to the listing. The listing is for pre-orders. You can wait for it if you want, but as it comes out every year, you might as well get one and update every two or three years unless you are intent on keeping up with the latest RM issues (which is a mammoth task in itself, given their diarrhoeic output).

copper plated steel is magnetic, bronze isn't. The bronze changed in 1992, so should be the only year where both can be found. The 5p & 10p changed to nickel plated steel from cupro-nickel in 2011. Again, one is magnetic, the other not. Five portraits have been used during the reign, those by Gillick, Machin, Maklouf, Rank-Broadley and Clark. The initials are below the truncation. I suggest you get a copy of Spink's Coins of England decimal section, which lists all the decimals since 1968 and is well illustrated for all the denominations. This is the current issue. www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SPINK-COINS-OF-ENGLAND-2020-DECIMAL-SECTION-ONLY-NEW/133549771118?hash=item1f182fc96e:g:QiAAAOSwSbRfeIMV

Royal Mail and Parcelforce are different companies, so their methods of processing orders is likely to be different too - hence the above.

The Dorian & Magens shillings came close, but the nearest an official strike came to complete melting was probably the 1945 silver 3d. However, that was related to the need to pay off debts and [presumably] the cessation of silver coinage was proposed by the time they were struck. Any wholesale withdrawal of coinage is usually politically motivated or for financial reasons. A copper penny doesn't fall into either camp.

I'm not too enthusiastic about the mint bringing them all back to be melted. I would have thought given the problems with dies in the past few years, that any coins made would be retained for release, even if not required at that moment. The previous few years had seen a lot of coins made with the wrong date for the year of manufacture, so why would they melt something they were guaranteed to need in the near future. The world wasn't predicted to end in 1852, and 1853, 1854 and 1855 are hardly rare years. But, crazier things have been done.

It would probably help if it is possible to get an approximate number of dies used per annum for the period in question. 1825 halfpennies for example had a mintage of 200K ish with 4 identifiable die pairs (though could be more if identical dies were produced). Whatever, 40-50K struck per die pair is a reasonable guess under normal circumstances. However, we do know that things went awry at the mint in the late 1840s when die life plunged dramatically. According to Linton's article on the 1848 halfcrown in the BNJ vol.29, in 1847 a total of 367K halfcrowns were struck from 22 obverse dies, implying only 16 or 17K per die i.e. roughly half. This accounts for the relatively large number of overcut dates in the second half of the decade, when existing dies were reused, presumably to maximise die use when the supply of new dies was uncertain. The same bar stock was almost certainly used for pennies as for halfcrowns, given they are about the same diameter and so presumably experienced the same problems if it was a metal problem, or if a metal treatment problem then it would apply to all dies. It is unhelpful that the mint records for 1848 to 1852 inclusive are missing according to Linton. A mintage of 236K would suggest between 5 and 13 obverse dies were used in 1852 depending on whether they had sorted the die life problem. My gut instinct is that it was only a temporary blip given the output of 'Godless' florins in 1849 and so we would be looking at somewhere between 30 and 50K per die - i.e. 5-8 dies. Wikipedia gives a mintage of 432,224 for 1851. Does this include 1852 for which none are given? Where does the figure of 236K come from or any quoted figures for the other years in the period 1848-52? How many discrete 1851 dies can be identified? If we are looking at a number well in excess of what you would expect based on expected output per die, then clearly much of the 1852 output was likely struck from 1851 dies, though you couldn't exclude the use of other existing dies, after all, 1849 was a relatively scarce year.