Rob

Then everybody will start playing safe and begin buying up all the old farthings and hammered! Prices will rocket but you won't be able to afford to buy any more! Ashmore is an example when hammered coins were reproduced on a massive scale.I have bought a couple.If you can buy original silver (which is plentiful if you run your detector over a few fields) a die can be reproduced and hey presto.A few Viking dies have been found. Learn boys learn. I don't mind contempory forgeries in fact I will buy them. There are a lot of hammered(and milled)gold coins out there. Man up as Mrs Peter says as she thrusts the broom in my hand.I give her a smile and a glass of white and everything is Honkeydory. You might need a mop and bucket rather than a broom - it's more practical.

Price them to the nearest pound. TBH, it doesn't really matter whether you paid 10p or £1 and when the time comes to sell, it won't matter either. A collection will contain some things that you overpaid for and others that were bought cheaply. The deviations from book prices will far outweigh any discrepancies arising from rounding error. And in time you probably won't give a damn.

I'd like to know why she has referred to William and not Willium III.

I think the key to identifying them will be in the legend. The letter quality of the 'Godless' is very good with angular sides to most characters. The 9 on the PCGS site example looks iffy as Stubby indicated. Knowing the weight and die axis look like being important too. If anyone has an example, it would be worth counting the milling too. That includes Palves' friend.

Doh. Really? Another one with the correct legend used in error. There's a real danger that soon, most legends will be correct.

They are ok and bidding seems to be all above board. As with other US auctions, they are a good place to buy rarities which haven't been given a big slab number because this determines the price most of the time. Any items won will be shipped to the UK by courier. It used to be that they used USPS with the nonsensical claim that the item was only tracked once it reached the UK. This I found out after the unique Freeman 689A and another pattern halfpenny (4 known) went missing in the post . As it happened, the two coins eventually made their way back to Heritage 7 months later and I received a phone call asking if I still wanted them. Since then, any item over $250(?) and shipped overseas has to go courier with the attendant customs fees and larger carriage bill (so add 5% plus $30 shipping to the total), but that is a small price to pay for not losing the irreplaceable. Credit where it is due.

This one is kosher if you can spot any detail differences. I don't have the weight of it though. Is it me, or does the gap between the number bases on yours look closer together? This would be logical if the Chinese dies were made from a cast.

It also depends on the price at which the dealer can buy, and in the climate of the past 2 or 3 years, anything at auction is going for more than you can sell on at. Bargains for the dealer are very thin on the ground, so don't get too hopeful.

With the exception of the idiots who list 1967 pennies or similar items at £1000 starting price on eBay, the more expensive items on ebay will often be known to dealers and collectors alike as an individual piece with some sort of provenance and hence an indicated value. It doesn't matter whether the sale was last week, last year or last century as long as you have a reference point relative to its peers. If you know the coin from seeing it in hand, so much the better. Anyone can spend as much as they like on ebay, including individual collectors if they are prepared to put their money where their collective mouths are. It isn't rocket science, just information gained from doing the spadework. If books or catalogues were bought or otherwise accumulated by individuals who then did the same research, they might like to spend a bit more too. As Peter keeps saying, know your subject.

The 1838 and 1848(?) are currency pieces. The 1838 is quite common and doesn't have the higher quality field associated with maundy money. The 1848 is not common. Hm, interesting, guess you learn something new every day! Thanks! Re-reading the reply I'd better add in case you get the wrong idea, that there are Maundy twopencess in the sets for 1838 and 1848 and not that they are replaced by currency pieces. It's just that currency pieces also exist.

The 1838 and 1848(?) are currency pieces. The 1838 is quite common and doesn't have the higher quality field associated with maundy money. The 1848 is not common.

It was the person I suspected. That narrows it down to two or three. B****r, I had a choice (still have) of the Briot Crown or F7 for the T in C slot. No prizes for guessing the easier of the two. Rob I'm Just being nosey (but please tell ) which Briot crown would that be? S2760 assuming one appears out of the woodwork. Blimey, I only know of the 3....the Brooker, the BM and the nice looking Ryan coin. Do you know of others? Nope. But you can never exclude another example appearing out of the blue. If another did appear how would you expect it to affect that 'book' price? cos it does seem a little OTT to me when comparing other rarities of equal interest! Probably not a lot because there are more than two collectors of crowns with deep pockets. Grade would obviously have a bearing, but I can see an example in fine easily making £5K irrespective of the current flight to quality on account of the acknowledged rarity. If Roddy got hold of one, you could add a few K to book and it would sell. Briot's coinage is a strange beast. The halfcrown I picked up earlier this year to my mind was cheap given the rarity. The mules are definitely commoner for both halfcrowns and shillings, but probably too subtle for most collectors. You are also looking at something a tad more esoteric which always puts a number of collectors off as they have few or no reference points. Some of these Briot coins are very, very rare - especially the anchor marked pieces. There are clearly more halfcrown collectors than crowns on account of them being cheaper, but at the top end the demand is probably comparable.

It was the person I suspected. That narrows it down to two or three. B****r, I had a choice (still have) of the Briot Crown or F7 for the T in C slot. No prizes for guessing the easier of the two. Rob I'm Just being nosey (but please tell ) which Briot crown would that be? S2760 assuming one appears out of the woodwork. Blimey, I only know of the 3....the Brooker, the BM and the nice looking Ryan coin. Do you know of others? Nope. But you can never exclude another example appearing out of the blue.

It was the person I suspected. That narrows it down to two or three. B****r, I had a choice (still have) of the Briot Crown or F7 for the T in C slot. No prizes for guessing the easier of the two. Rob I'm Just being nosey (but please tell ) which Briot crown would that be? S2760 assuming one appears out of the woodwork.

It was the person I suspected. That narrows it down to two or three. B****r, I had a choice (still have) of the Briot Crown or F7 for the T in C slot. No prizes for guessing the easier of the two. mm .. well, if you will set yourself these challenges Rob .. Serves me right for seeking diversity.

Probably about right.

It was the person I suspected. That narrows it down to two or three. B****r, I had a choice (still have) of the Briot Crown or F7 for the T in C slot. No prizes for guessing the easier of the two.

Probably £251. We are talking ebay here.

That's it though. Most of the contents are inevitably duplicated because books that cover the same topic must inevitably do so, but only after reading a book can you safely say there isn't anything new and at that point rationalise the library.

You know Dave I did see that one but didn't really look closely and realise they were birds. Thank you for pointing it out! If it was some sort of stamping machine Stuart then that might mean that there are other coins out there with the same stamping, must watch out. I've seen those machines around which stamp, flatten and stretch coins but I've always thought them too expensive to let my boys have a go - maybe I should as they might be the collectables of the future What, one of these? Spoilsport. Your secret is out Rob, a true anorak, a Thomas The Tank Engine spotter! When we were kids, a train was the time honoured means of creating flat discs for all those variety collectors out there. Anyway, never too old for Thomas.

This finished at around the £250 mark!

You know Dave I did see that one but didn't really look closely and realise they were birds. Thank you for pointing it out! If it was some sort of stamping machine Stuart then that might mean that there are other coins out there with the same stamping, must watch out. I've seen those machines around which stamp, flatten and stretch coins but I've always thought them too expensive to let my boys have a go - maybe I should as they might be the collectables of the future What, one of these? Spoilsport.

Well, it's possible. The problem is agreeing where to stop. If you look at modern coins then differences between one (micro-)variety and another can be down to whether a tooth in the border aligns with a feature or not, or the spacing between the bust and border down to parts of a millimetre. With hammered coins striking quirks, die wear or damage can make two coins struck from the same die look subtly different. Do we count those as varieties, agree that we'll stop at a particular die pairing (Morrieson tried this), or just aim for a general description such as Osborne's (or Sharp or Spink or North ....) I guess it comes down to what sort of collector you are and whether several broadly similar, but subtly different coins is your aim or you are happy to stop at collecting by type or ... Personally, while a portrait/reverse combination I don't have would be a draw, I'm not worried about finding examples of each different privy mark, legend variation etc. The is the crux of all detailed references. Morrieson essentially defined varieties by marks, stops, legends and general detail, but then noted several dies conforming to type where the position of the legend varied. These of course would have been recorded by Freeman, Davies, Groom etc as individual varieties. With the double striking inherent in hammered coins, you have to be very careful in attributing any die to a particular variety. If you have a reverse die reading CHRITO for example, it only takes a small rotation between strikes to produce the same result from a die with the full reading. This is easily confused. This is a good example. The description reads that it is a different die to Brooker 1145 which is Allen obverse C, probably struck at Worcester in Jan-Feb 1644/5. The obverse of this C25 is double struck giving a reading HI I RX. The key indicator is that the A of CAROLVS is almost superimposed on the R. Compare with this image of a C18 which is cleanly struck and you might think they were different dies, but they aren't. You obviously need a number of matching reference points to establish whether dies are the same or not. Up to 30 degrees rotation is not uncommon, but more is possible. I have a shilling with a full 90 degree rotation. There is an Exeter C11 crown ex-Cumberland Clark with a 5 legged horse, and no, it isn't what you are thinking!. You also get remedial work carried out on dies leading to what is effectively another variety but of the same die e.g. the Chester halfcrown with CHST below the horse. There are examples reading HIR for HIB such as the Spink plate coin, but this was subsequently recut along with other parts of the legend to read HIB whilst still retaining the underlying R. Micro varieties are easily distinguished on milled coinage, but with hammered you have to be a lot more circumspect.

Do you know who bought it? I was too late.

All books are worth acquiring because you frequently find a snippet of information that isn't written elsewhere. The bulk of most books on a subject will be common to nearly all, but the minutiae in each text often reveals a clearer picture when considered in aggregate.