Rob

Good disagreement across the board here - excellent for a sensible debate. The point I take issue with is the concept of needing to regulate what is a minor discretionary purchase. If the public is legally or otherwise obliged to purchase an item or a service then a case can be made for regulation of some form or other. What we are talking about here is a hobby - a pastime that people dip into and out of at their leisure depending in all probability on the weather and to a greater extent how much spare cash they have. Please do not suggest it should be regulated in the same way as investments etc. If someone's spare time is occupied with rebuilding old cars, you don't expect them to fit the steering wheel where the spare is kept because you assume they have made the effort to inform themselves where it should go and if they did fit it in the wrong place you would rightly call them a ****. There are plenty of books available on coins, it just requires the individual to make a few cheap purchases and learn. If they can't read and write, that is not the fault of the coin market. You do not go on safari to the Maldives. You do not rely on Thunderbirds to rescue you from a desperate situation - they may not get there in time. The whole concept of consumer protection is a moot point. Why the need to protect someone from paying £5 for a 1967 1d, when the government happily legalises the National Lottery and allows people to spend £1 on the Dream Number which pays you a tenner when you get the first two numbers right despite the odds being 1 in 100. Or is it just a case of trying to earn political brownie points by pretending to be caring? Frankly, the odds of being screwed by politicians or politically designed instruments are greater than that of an ebay con-merchant. At least you have an option not to buy into the ebay purchase As regards pricing, those quoted in Spink are frequently gross underestimates of reality in the saleroom. At a sale with half decent material, both the estimate and the book price are regularly beaten simply because demand outstrips supply. Most items I bid on end up going past both these figures. Sometimes I will pay over book and sometimes not, but at no point am I restricted to either an upper or lower price level based on Spink. I bid & pay according to how badly I want the piece or whether I think it is undervalued. Spink's annual tome has become a de facto price guide simply because it is the only one that covers the whole series. It doesn't cover everything though, because there is insufficient room to accommodate all the price variations for rarities within a type, a point they freely acknowledge. They aren't driving the market, in fact they can't get sufficient new material in for resale because it is all going elsewhere. Their prices are taken from those realised around the country and further afield. A couple of weeks ago in the Heritage sale, an MS65 slabbed 1901 penny sold for about £600! I paid £2.21 for mine on ebay about 6 years ago. Spink currently lists them at £35. Does it require full scale government intervention on the basis that I bought it too cheaply. I think not. A couple years ago I bid about £3K on a coin that was listed in VF at £400. I came second. Does the government feel so aggrieved at my loss of self control in ignoring the "official price" that it sends me to the funny farm for a bit of re-education? Of course not - yet. If the market is to be regulated, then below fair value items would also not be permitted. Be careful what you ask for. If somebody loses out because they have done no homework regarding pricing, it isn't my fault, the government's fault, trading standards fault or Spink's fault. The person involved could have read, asked questions on a forum such as this or asked people attending coin fairs for an opinion. The buck stops squarely with the individual and there is no case for wasting valuable public funds on such a trivial matter.

It's better than VF. The seller gives it gVF, but I think it might be EF in the hand. The big danger is that it could have been cleaned which is not certain from the images. It's quite a decent coin for wear though.

It is Scottish. There are a few varieties, so would need a picture to establish which one.

I think all this worry about the differences in prices between publications is a non-problem. If you look at the prices of various coins in Spink, some regularly go for over book and some under book. As a result you can only ever use it as a ball park figure because 4 figures for 4 grades can only ever give an approximation to what someone is prepared to pay. I suspect that much of the problem is that buyers want to refer to the cheapest publicised price and sellers the most expensive. Life is all about people making an educated assessment of an item's worth. After all, if you want to regulate everything from cradle to grave, why do we not have a state regulator determined price for 800g of bread? You can't tell people what to pay for a coin. If someone wants to reference their prices (both buying and selling) to Spink's then that is their choice, as is another's who uses CCGB. This doesn't need regulating, rather that buyers do adequate homework establishing what similar coins normally trade at instead of living in a nanny state. Nobody ever says mea culpa these days, it is always the fault of somebody else. The examples in Spink go both ways. A 1797 1d can frequently be bought for around a third to half of Spink's cost for a coin in UNC, but when was the last time you saw an FDC Godless Florin pattern sell for £1150? Double this would be closer to the truth as the last Spink sale would bear out. At the same sale an 1887 £2 made about £4K including premium against 2009 book prices of £650 (currency) or £1200 (proof). You can't blame Spink for the prices people voluntarily pay at auction any more than you can proscribe a selling price for a particular coin in a predetermined grade. And if you do that, then you must also regulate the maximum price a seller is allowed to pay when buying in material so that the dealer can make a living. Come on everybody, do your homework and find out what others are willing to pay. If you think it too much then don't buy or bid at a sale. Nobody is a forced buyer. If any regulation has to take place it would be much better directed at the nonsensical purveyors of dross on ebay where a fool and their money are frequently parted on the basis of the seller's frequently overgraded sales pitch together with the uneducated person's desire for a coin described as being worth a certain amount in Spink. To boot, many of the coins offered aren't even worth the lower values given in CCGB or other publications. My heart does not bleed for these people.

Doesn't this cost more in petrol if done on a regular basis than buying the book outright? And it's always to hand.

Or a fair to fine as high grade, stunning etc.

The first one is a flaw from the base of the F which then passes below the legend to the right. The second is just a double cut 1. The third could be due to a filled die or weakly punched in the first place. The fourth again looks to be a flaw. It doesn't appear to be a 1746/5 which is a recognised variety. I don't think there is anything to get excited about with this coin as all the evidence suggests it is struck from a worn die that may or may not have had remedial work done to extend its life. As it isn't in the best condition it is difficult to say precisely.

It's kosher. It's a security edge incorporated into the coin when it was struck to help prevent forgeries. Boulton & Watt were quite keen to prevent forgeries because since the early years of the reign of George III, counterfeit halfpennies and farthings accounted for a majority of the coinage.

You can remove the inner part by putting the coin into liquid nitrogen. With different coefficients of expansion for the two metals, the insert falls out without the need to apply any damaging forces, so it would be easy to produce a mint state "error".

That is normal for the issue. Prior to the 1816 recoinage, currency pieces normally had an inverted die axis (en-coin). From 1816 to 1887 you had a mixture, with some issues having an upright die axis (en-medaille). From 1887 onwards en-medaille was the norm.

That is probably because they get innundated with requests from people like the **** who listed the corroded lump of metal,- sorry-1952 Elizabeth II brass threepence on eBay. If I received a request like that, I would have difficulty in not calling a spade, a spade.

There's nothing unusual about these features. Recutting legends has always been used to extend the life of the dies, or perhaps it wasn't cut cleanly in the first place..

Has anyone seen or does anyone know what the profile is for the location mechanism when fixing the dies in place. If square, then you could get die axis errors of 90 degrees as well as being struck en coin or en medaille. If triangular then it could be 120 degrees out either way, if hexagonal etc. I know that square profiles have been used in the past because this shilling in my gallery has transposed Irish & French shields. The die was originally cut with the shields reversed. The person who located it in the milling equipment obviously was accustomed to aligning the French arms with the top of the obvese die. As a result, all of the other three shields are in the wrong position and the date is at 9 o'clock. This outcome is only compatible with a profile having multiples of 4 faces, unless someone else can come up with a flaw in the argument. There are many other exampes of upright and inverted features in addition to those already noted. The 1839 proofs are both, the collar on the FOB crown can be inverted or upright, the inverted die axis 1841 1/2d etc. The gist of this is that it would be possible to strike coins with either die axis either by accident or design and so I don't think you can dismiss this unless you can find a second identical piece with similar marks that you wouldn't find on an as struck coin, or a metal analysis which showed a composition that was clearly to the wrong standard. I haven't seen anything obviously wrong in the images. Another thing in its favour is the double cut I in GRATIA. This is the sort of feature that would get fuzzy if it were from a cast.

Wasn't it something like 'wosip' or similar? He used to call himself Wossip, but is now using Coriander1860.

I was at that auction and kept a note of who bought what. The names bounced around the room like a squash ball. My impression was there was a general atmosphere of people not wanting to bid because of the seller. I bought a few things there, and as you have noted, later. This was the golden era for patterns that were not silver or gold, most people had little idea about them and the decimal trials were a gift. If a few lots means just that, then welcome Joanna. Your name is spelt incorrectly in my ex-Seaby copy of the Freeman catalogue, but ties in with the DNW sale attributions. If I am right in this, you did quite well out of me in DNW and with hindsight I should have bought a few more pieces.

Both names?

And me too. You can block messages from specific users in your control panel.

One of the buyers was Michael Freeman (coriander1860) & there was another one I recognised in the first 6 pages of feedback - markw5701.

Presumably this is the same piece as lot 258 in the last DNW sale. Estimate £900-1200 but unsold. The description - "Some light surfacce scratches on obverse, otherwise extremely fine, the edge errors apparently unpublished".

Offer him 5 euros and see what he says. It isn't a BB reverse whatever

Given this is the wife's home town I think that is most unfair. As a city of great culture featuring nearly 100 breweries in the gemeinde, I consider it to be something approaching paradise. To make it look like Brixton after the riots, you must have visited many of the small clusters of breweries found every km or two in just about every inhabited part of this area. Treat yourself to a few pints and some fodder at Brauerei Knoblach in Schammelsdorf and don't forget to order a taxi before you start.

The pictures aren't very good, but isn't it a toothed border both sides? It doesn't look like a TB/BB mule which is the rare variety. If a TB then it's out by a factor of x100 and worth about Euros 4.98 (maybe a little more)

Only to a degree. The prices of the scarcer types are dictated by what dealers can buy for. For these there isn't likely to be much to play with, so don't expect consistency in any negotiated discount. This is why you need to have an appreciation of the relative rarities. Prices at the top end are going off scale simply because of the material shortage. For popular but rare items this is filtering down the grades. In contrast, a 1967 penny will for ever be well nigh impossible to sell.

The important thing is not to let the tail wag the dog. All price guides are just that. None are accurate. Do your own homework, learn to grade accurately and see what a specific variety is selling for in a particular grade. Although there is no substitute for seeing a coin in the hand, compare the images with the realised prices at auction, or the price in a dealer's tray and you will build up an appreciation of the going rate for a specific coin. At the level of Peckris' 1948 penny, the difference between an underpriced and overpriced item is no more than the cost of a cup of coffee and so if you overpay you are unlikely to go hungry that night. Certainly no damage will be done. But when you have no feeling for the coins themselves or the market you can get stung badly. That is why so many people pay over the odds on ebay for example. They buy the description and not the coin. Very few listings say this coin is crap or low grade, but an awful lot call crap - superb. If you are looking for a superb example, then this piece of superb crap is the ideal coin for you - sucker. As always, caveat emptor. As a beginner, you are probably better off concentrating on getting it right with the basic types. You certainly should not make a financial mistake at the same level as for a rare variety as there are more examples available to build up your chosen database. In this instance you may thus benefit from the occasional undetected rarity purchased for the price of a basic example. You also have to consider that there are fewer collectors of most rare varieties because there are insufficient examples to go around, so they are less liquid. A coin of which there are 3 known but only 2 collectors is therefore common.

This could take a long time to answer. The S/I is only one of many varieties that were not listed in Spink. Coins of England is really just a wide ranging selection of guide prices for all the recognised currency types with a few patterns, proofs and varieties added to the list (and some deleted) depending on the available space and as and when they pass through salerooms. Extremely rare historically meant that none had been to auction in recent times or that they had a recognised rarity based on specialised publications such as Peck or ESC, though this must be set against the fact that Spink also quote prices for some pieces which are not available because the only known piece is in a museum. To produce a publication covering all varieties would be unwieldy, horrendously expensive and consequently would not appeal to many collectors. Updating it on a regular basis would be a nightmare too. Most people collect either a wide range of material in lower grades or a specialise in a series - say bronze pennies for example, but with a higher average grade. If you collect coins from across the globe then you would probably look at Krause & Mischler (a US publication) for the widest coverage, but if you only collect milled silver then Spink and ESC backed up by Davies would be more appropriate. There are many varieties that haven't been recorded in the standard references which means that you need to do your own research using daa from past sales and dealers' lists if you want to establish a list of vaguely accurate rarities for your chosen field. You shouldn't take the values in Spink, CCGB or any other price list as gospel. some are too high, some are too low and some about right. No two coins are identical either, and so despite being in the same nominal grade they could command wildly differing prices. It is not necessarily a good thing to reject an apparently overpriced coin. Sometimes there is a very good reason for it, so you need to do your own research and establish what is out there in the market place and how much they typically sell for. If you collect both hammered and milled, then Spink's tome is the only realistic publication, but even then you come up against the problem that the price given is only really applicable to the commonest variety of the type. What looks like a £200 coin could easily sell for £2K if it is a sought after rare variety. Recent bidding lunacy in the bronze penny department bears witness to this as noted on other threads.