Rob

Is that yours, and if so is it the one that Roddy had?

I live in a thousand parallel universes where each has a different piece to idolise, so here's a coin from one of them. Peck 834 thick flan silver proof halfpenny and my website logo coin.

The images are a bit small. You need straight on clear pictures with this series because portrait and letter features determine the type and hence the reign.

He has.

I have problems with the "Ashby" attribution. Lots of things don't add up when taken as part of the A & B mint scenario hypothesised by Boon.

How about rare coin in a common grade?

Dire, but as Hobson's Coice - desirable.

You buy it and I'll lend you the Brasso. Incidentally, do both Rob's higher grade coin and that on E-bay look as if the 7 has been struck over a 6, or is it just me? I can't see it on Rob's second image, but the other two do especially Rob's first image. I looked at that coin from every conceivable angle, but could never convince myself there was an underlying 6 other than from the image and so sold it as a straight 7. I also couldn't see it past gEF because it had obviously been dipped and lightly wiped at some point. The rim was also a bit grotty at 6 o'clock, so it had to go as I only needed a type example which I filled with an 1826 proof. I think that most dates exist with overcut last digits for most years throughout the 1800s if you look carefully enough. Maybe not the YH Victorian crowns, but certainly for most of the lower denominations.

Don't think so. For what it's worth, the two below were on the website in the past couple of years. The first one looks to have the same slightly smaller 7 which is possibly over a 6. Apologies in advance for the autodefocus on the second one.

A few years ago I went to buy some vinyl flooring for the bathroom; the rolls were 2 metre wide, but the carpet shop sold lengths by the yard! Crazy system, our kids are taught metric at school, but the real world exists in imperial The French ditched £sd (Livres, sols, et deniers) in 1800 and introduced the standard metre and kilogram The whole world (except ouselves and the Americans) uses metric in everyday life, and all science and engineering is now in SI units (no more Horse Power or Foot Poundals) So why do we insist on buying boiled ham in ounces? It is a crazy system, David, as we are neither one thing nor the other. At least the continentals and the Americans are unashamedly either metric or imperial. But I'll still stick to buying a quarter of ham at the deli If you are numerate, it doesn't matter which system(s) you use. The wonderfully convenient calculator was the downfall of mental arithmetic. If I play darts I use chalk to mark, but frequently seem to be in a minority of one or two. The majority can't do basic sums, but can prod a keypad - sounds familiar? If people use a machine to calculate even basic sums, then metric is the only way. Standardising is extremely useful as it helps to prevent cock-ups such as the Mars lander where a combination of imperial and metric units caused it to hit the surface at three times the intended speed.

The buyers in the salerooms have been both UK & US. The demand is quite deep rooted now with a lot of new entrants to the market. A good demonstration of this is given by bidder numbers at the various houses. In the last 5 or 6 years the number or registered clients has at least doubled. It is this base which is responsible for the price hikes. More people have more money (than a decade ago) and given the financial instability, you might as well take a punt and lose it because all governments are guaranteed to *** it up against the wall for you. What they don't have or know about, they can't take. In these uncertain finacial times i cannot see how people have more money. My old workplace in the UK have not had a wage rise in 4 years, they are always letting people go, higher fuel prices etc is always eating away at the middle classes pockets, so i'm stumped as to where the big money is coming from, hence my view that a normal working class hobbiest cannot sustain large price hikes in UNC coins and will inevitably drop a grade to try and keep their collection ticking over. Lets bear in mind that not all collectors come from London or Manchester where there is higher salaries. There is hobbiests all over who must be feeling the squeeze with lower salaries and higher living costs, hence my view that the VF+ and EF grades will eventually rise due to these factors Wages have stagnated in the last 3 -4 years, but prior to that wages were buoyant due to the apparent success of the economy because the government was spending much more than it took in taxes. Government spending exceeded taxation receipts by hundreds of billions in cash terms between 2000 and 2005. That is a huge influx of money into the system which stimulated the economy and fed through into wage packets via the increased public sector employment and government spending to service these jobs which fed into the private sector wage packets. Some of this was spent on consumables by the people who had to have the latest gadgets or a new car etc. For some people saving is a complete anathema, but half the people of this country pay off their credit cards every month and save the money that is surplus. That money now sitting in savings accounts is being eroded by increased inflation or the danger that the finacial institution could go t**s up and is held by precisely the same people who would typically collect coins. In recessionary times people feel insecure, but in reality only a small percentage of people lose their job which is the real killer for discretionary expenditure. A lot of people who have no money now, didn't have it in the past either. If you have money on deposit, and the rate of return is less than inflation, you are better off spending it. Asset prices must inevitably rise to reflect the amount of money in circulation that is backing those assets i.e the inflation figures have to show an increase to take account of the additional money that has been printed and pumped into the system. Collectors don't buy coins solely from disposable income at the end of the month otherwise there would be virtually no market for coins over a few thousand pounds - it has to come from liquidated savings.

The buyers in the salerooms have been both UK & US. The demand is quite deep rooted now with a lot of new entrants to the market. A good demonstration of this is given by bidder numbers at the various houses. In the last 5 or 6 years the number or registered clients has at least doubled. It is this base which is responsible for the price hikes. More people have more money (than a decade ago) and given the financial instability, you might as well take a punt and lose it because all governments are guaranteed to *** it up against the wall for you. What they don't have or know about, they can't take.

I'm not so sure about the collectors of UNC coins running out of money in the near future. Most collectors are people who live within their means and tend to have a bit of spare cash lying around. To buy lower grades in order to continue acquiring at the same rate doesn't fit the collecting mentality. If you want high grade coins you will continue to collect them. A collection is typically made up of a long term set of purchasing decisions. Some coins you will overpay for, others will be cheap, but in the long run things will even themselves out. It might possibly happen when the wants list is reduced to a handful of coins which they haven't a cat in hells chance of affording and the desire to complete is overwhelming, but otherwise I think most collectors will stay focussed.

I emailed her 4 days ago to say it was a modern repro and only worth a quid or two. Needless to say with it already at £410 the silence was deafening.

The key word is not toned, but monster. That's the word you invariably see when the toning is OTT and it comes from the States. It can be chemical, it can be heat, but which ever way you look at it, it ain't natural. The following for these coins has undoubtedly been underpinned by the TPGs slabbing them as genuine and untampered with. If they always came back as environmentally damaged, you would destroy a complete cottage industry.

John (Chingford) has one too.

I think you will see less than you might expect. In the hammered section the really large increases have been for coins above VF. As Spink only list Fine and VF prices, these will not reflect the top end. Having said that, there have still been significant upward movements on the rarer items which may only be available in VF at best. Any decent hammered gold or silver pieces sell the minute they become available. The Brady groats should mean that they are revised upwards as a denomination in general which is probably welcome as the last major offering of this denomination was the Ivan Buck collection in 2005. Don't expect too much change in Fine prices across the board, but anything remotely desirable has become progressively more so. This broadly reflects the market for miled coins too. Mint state examples of anything fly off the shelf. Average grade pieces have possibly moved up a bit, but not by much. Maundy has done well over the past year. Rather bizarrely, so have 20th century pieces which are relatively speaking very common.

even more frustrating Dave, is at auction and you've the cash for a coin....but somebody else has more There's always someone with deeper pockets And if we all had the same resources, the numismatic market would find some other way to ensure that the best pieces were retained by a few friends of the major players. A bit like the Soviet Union maybe where you have holiday resorts reserved for party members - all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. C'est la vie.

It's all relative. It doesn't really matter whether the best is UNC, EF, VF or Fine and I know of coins in all these grades that fit the argument. The best available will always be sought by the affluent specialist collectors. If you decide to collect a particular series and the one real rarity commands a 4 or 5 figure sum, then if it is remotely within your means, you will try for it. If a coin doesn't exist in top grade, the next grade down will do and there will be a corresponding adjustment to grade/price compared to the common pieces. The price is dictated more by the desire to fill the hole in the various collections and many of those people have more than sufficient spare capital to make the collecting dream a reality. You should probably be grateful that most collectors have a stop button otherwise prices could go much higher and far fewer people could ever obtain pieces in top grade (1967 pennies excepted).

Prices at Spink today were strong (all prices are hammer). The Brady collection of groats saw some strong prices amongst the lots on offer. The 6 Edward I groats realised between £3600 and £10500 hammer. Lot 33, the Edward III treaty groat hammered at £1850, or about x10 the VF price for this issue which blew me out the water as I only had it down as a £1K bid, though was described by Patrick Finn in his list as the best example you are ever likely to encounter. The three Henry IV light coinage pieces (lots 64-66) made £7200, £19K and £4400 respectively - all well in excess of estimate. The very rare Henry VI unmarked issue made £5200 against an estimate of £2500-3500. The rather nice Edward IV light coinage Norwich groat made over double its £500 estimate and the Richard III coins all made well in excess of estimate. A price of less than £2K for any Richard III groat looks unlikely for the foreseeable future. The Lambert Simnel (lot 242) made £4800 and Perkin Warbeck in the following lot made £7K. The Henry VIII Tournai groat realised £2800 against £1000-1500 and the Gros of Tournai under English rule made the highest price of £22K against £5-6K estimate. The Thomas Wolsey groat (lot 305) made £1650 which is a lot for a not particularly scarce coin. The Mary sole rule coins were a real surprise making £850, £1100 and £1000, particularly when the most expensive one had scratches in front of the bust. The strength continued through Elizabeth and into Charles I with the really attractive Worcester (lot 377) making £4600 against an estimate of £1200-1500 and a total cost to the purchaser of nearly £5800 - or three and a half times current Spink book prices. Very few things failed to beat the estimate and in most cases comfortably exceeded it. I did win one lot (369) which was the Rawlins signed bust with the normal style declaration reverse, but had to pay quite heavily for it at over double estimate and book. However, I was quite pleased to get it as it appears to be the only example available and at least has a decent provenance.

even more frustrating Dave, is at auction and you've the cash for a coin....but somebody else has more That is invariably the problem. We all have a nemesis or two.

Yes, but it isn't sensitive enough to differentiate silver fineness. For that you need to do a proper analysis compared to a standard.

It was the "Lion rampant on crown, within circle" reverse design, not the usual "oak sprigs and acorns". A certain amount of the price may be due to the provenance that it came from the late Alfred Bole's collection. As the soon to be obsolete design and not recorded in ESC, Davies, Coincraft or anywhere else that I am aware of, it was always going to do well. Bole had a good selection of unrecorded sixpences, including unrecorded designs and unrecorded varieties of existing designs. Get two serious sixpence collectors who want the only piece and wait for the money to roll in. If you have an item that is normally in 500 silver, but you suspect it may be in finer silver on account of the ring, then you would be best served by getting an EDX run from the RM or similar institution with these facilities. A different ring tone could be accounted for by flan defects, so the only sure way is to get something like the attached.

I'd always assumed it was a misprunt, just as many emails of mine end in amny thnaks. Damned coordination.

The last line explains the first. More pertinent perhaps is the question, how do you define silly money? Buying coins is just a variation on a common theme where you will pay different prices for different products or the same product in different conditions, after all, you wouldn't pay the same money for a new car as for an older car of the same model. Even if you pay only £10 for a coin in VF, in the eyes of the person who would pay £8 tops, you have paid silly money. Cars depreciate the minute they leave the forecourt and coins are no different. You can't remedy lost lustre. Buying into a top of the range product that can only get scarcer with time is not such a strange idea when you consider that only a very small percentage of a currency issue will remain in this condition, even soon after issue (1967 pennies excepted). People are always bemoaning the price of top grade pieces, but the same people have no qualms about upgrading at the same price as the inferior item. If you want a coin in a particular grade, then it is reasonable to pay the market rate for that item, which is a function of supply and demand.