Rob

No things got cut short as they are a bit short staffed at the moment with people on maternity, so really only looked a few trays of hammered together with some the important crowns, i.e. Petition, Reddite, Oxford City View, various Cromwells including a Dutch Copy, Incorrupta, 3 Graces, Mills large head etc. I wanted to see the halfpennies, but that will have to wait for another day.

Despite the obvious assumption people would make; with no legend, there is nothing to indicate it portrays Victoria on the obverse. The reverse could just as easily be part of a campaign to ban men in cloaks. St. Andrew's Day commemorative medallion, issued in association with a religious get together? There is a large number of tokens/medallions extant whose raison d'etre is a complete mystery to all bar a few. This would easily fit into that category in the absence of any documentation.

Slightly off-topic, but still relevant. I think base coins have been collected throughout history. The lack of early documentation should not mean that numismatics was invented a few hundred years ago. e.g. The Bolsena hoard found 1890 in northern Italy contained several hundred Roman bronzes in top grade covering a period of roughly 170 years from Augustus onwards. There is no way that these were coins taken from circulation shortly before they were lost to their Roman(?) owner because sestertii and other bronzes were the currency workhorses that would rapidly wear with everyday use. Individual wealth was tied up in silver and gold. i.e. the bronzes had to be collected, and more importantly, they must have had a succession of owners, implying an established hobby, and by extension a rudimentary knowledge of coins from an historical angle. Everything unproven is by definition conjecture, but it would be unreasonable to either assume or dismiss a reasoned argument given we only know a fraction of what actually happened 2, 3, 400 years ago or earlier

It's difficult to be sympathetic as they both would have received at least a substantial 6 figure sum and possibly more. I don't understand what's wrong with rejecting a lot of money, particularly given the cost of fencing such a substantial quantity of illicit material would likely reduce the total proceeds to around half the value of the hoard - or about what they would have received anyway. Pure greed and stupidity, but I'm not sure in which order.

First bust has the hair circles, third has hair strands. 2nd needs no explanation. For what it's worth, mine only has the tie ends visible.

This has been discussed elsewhere on this forum. Consensus is that the term VIP was introduced for proofs struck in the years where there were no public sets issued, for the simple reason that with so few sets produced, any distributed had to be for presentation to specific individuals (for which read VIPs). For the frosted proofs in public year sets, my personal preference would be for them being early strikes. Possibly they were struck to a higher standard for a few people, but I would have thought this unlikely with it being more a case of filling the order for so called VIP sets first before mass production took over. Maybe a different presentation case could differentiate the two, if they were struck in the first place.

I think we have drifted away from the opening post. The 2015 sale was Slaney part 2. That name was always going to help sales and pre-sale estimates of the total were about £3m, which was in line with coin price inflation since the first portion was sold in 2003. This was not far off the mark. So the initial price paid at £4340 all in was too high against an estimate of 2000-2500. But, for a coin to have sold at such an inflated price is a good marketing point. If it can make this much once, then it could do so again. The second sale last September reflected the lack of hype associated with Slaney. The success of the first Slaney sale was down to a group of coins that had been off the market for a couple generations. That will always help prices compared to the usual offerings which are returning to market every few years, even though the grade of many items was not particularly brilliant. The second Slaney sale in 2015 flew on the back of the first. As for the grading, it is still just a matter of opinion. I noted a post on a US forum which said his agent dealer considered the coin undergraded in a catalogue and so bid it up having assigned a higher grade. As the person responsible for the grade in the catalogue I have to say I disagree with the dealer's assessment, but it is a question of each to their own. At the end of the day, everyone is happy - the vendor for achieving a higher price, me as I was paid for the cataloguing, the buyer getting a coin that he wanted at a price he was happy with and his agent was happy with his commission. As for the guinea, I haven't seen the coin in question in hand and cannot give my considered opinion of its grade. All I can guarantee is that if I assessed the grade, it will agree with some and disagree with others. TBH I'm not sure this coin is something a person new to the hobby is likely to be considering, so there is little danger of them getting hurt. Most people entering the hobby start with modern coins that are cheap in case they make a mistake. Gold or silver they usually buy close to spot. A William III guinea doesn't come close to fitting these criteria. Rather more pernicious is the marketing of 'collectable', 'investment coins' that are not coins in any way shape or form. Just this week I picked up around £1Ks worth of these private concoctions that cost the purchaser 4, 5 or more times their intrinsic or secondary market value. Paying 3 figures for a gram of 9 carat gold just because it says highly collectable investment in the advert is not very clever - and so another inheritance nest egg disappoints. There is the real rip-off.

But the point is that everyone has their own view on grades and how to grade. Nobody is 'right', but it is possible to be completely wrong. Ebay laughs highlights the latter, but I would like to point out that as far as I know, no listing has featured for calling a coin fine when it is quite patently uncirculated, even though it would be a legitimate post. Surely undergrading can be just as laughable as overgrading?

That's been done by auction houses ad infinitum. You can take practically any coin over the past couple of centuries and find that in any one sale they will miss out part of the provenance. Marketing is about trying to talk up the item in question, so the last thing you want to do is say the market for these is a bit weak at the moment. I have no problem with this, as I believe it is in everyone's interest to do the necessary due diligence. In the case of sales documented on the internet, if you care about prices, do a modicum of research. If you don't care about prices, the only people who are miffed are the ones who made the checks and concluded they are not buying. There's no point being miffed by proxy. Another reason for missing recent sale info is that it gives the impression someone is trying to turn it round for a quick profit, which seems to put some people off. Anyone in business is trying/has to do this to make a living. The same goes for a private collector who buys a bulk lot for one or two coins, then wants to sell the surplus. He isn't going to say give me the difference between market value of the coins I want to keep and the cost of the lot, rather try to maximise his return without reference to the fact that he probably got the bulk lot at a huge discount to individual prices in the first place. It's marketing and I don't believe does any harm other than the purchaser to kick themselves for missing the bargain when it sold cheaply. I have bought many coins soon after they were sold for more money than at the sale and will do so in the future. You can't be in all places at the same time.

No, I had a look at it and it rang no bells

Grading is/was/always will be an inexact science. Consider the item below and the grades assigned. It is an Oxford 1645 F-7 halfcrown with the following provenance and the grades assigned were as follows: Mrs Street, collection bought by Marsham. R W Marsham-Townsend 563, VF H Montagu (III) 516, VF G Hamilton-Smith (1913) 95, Unusually good R C Lockett 2460, Mint State F Willis 298, VF Lloyd Bennett, gVF or better. FWIW, I would give it as not far off as struck. So aEF but a little soft in the strike, with the thin wear lines on the top of some reverse detail clearly showing how little actual wear there is, but visually you couldn't argue convincingly against any of them except the Lockett description, which gives an absolute grade. It just depends on what the focal point is. Just buy the coin as you see it, because there is no way we are going to get universal agreement on this topic.

I think it is.

Both look broken to me.

I think it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation. A famous name is not a cast -iron guarantee of the best coin, and even if it is at the time of writing, can be superseded by a new find. A few collections are unquestionably outstanding in both quality and depth, but a constant rate of attrition to the corpus of available coins due to museum purchases and bequests means that the remaining quality coins with a long and distinguished provenance are gradually reducing, and increasingly sought after. A good example of changing fortunes is that of Montagu's Petition Crown, now in Blackburn Museum as a result of the Hart bequest in 1946. At the time of the Montagu sale in 1896 it was considered the best available example and had a provenance going back to the mid-18th century, but having viewed it last week, I can definitely say it is now a clear second to the Slaney coin, which was an unknown example during the 19th century having been out of sight since 1789 when a previous owner died. GC did some work on his family tree about 5 years ago, and in a short space of time showed a direct line of descent from the 1st Earl of Clarendon - Charles II's Lord Chancellor at the time the Petition Crowns were struck. Can the continuous family ownership be proven? Sadly not, but I'd have a fiver on it being the case because if anyone was going to receive an example, it had to be the top brass in government or other royals and it notably was not known to other collectors in the early 18th century. I think one factor that is often overlooked is the unappreciated rarity of really nice pieces which can only account for a minute fraction of a percent of the total coins available to collectors. Time and time again, a corpus of a type will reveal only a couple decent examples at the head of a long tail of also-rans, and these are the coins that more often than not were in the best named collections. But then they found their way in because the collector had the money to spend in the first place, thus saving the vendor time and effort searching for a buyer. This is a win-win situation for both parties and is the way collecting and much of life has always been. Jobs for the boys is the same principle viewed from a different angle.

I wish I'd thought of the question myself, as with hindsight it's bleedin' obvious. Sturgeon has long been showing her admiration for anything not English or better still anti-English. A bad case of my enemy's enemy being my best friend IMO.

Scotland under the SNP

A ticket can tell a lot. I bought this coin in Stewartby and didn't recognise the significance of the ticket when cataloguing at the time. However, on reflection the characteristic H in 'not in Hawkins' screamed Webb, and the Sotheby 21/5/74 didn't make sense until I realised it was 1874, at which point the not in Hawkins made sense because Hugh Howard was an Irish collector who died in 1738 but the collection was sold 136 years later at Sotheby's 20-22nd May 1874, which is why Hawkins didn't know about it. Suddenly, an unquestionably rare but not particularly appealing halfgroat had a load of history added, so I bought it instead of ignoring it as I would have done knowing there is a better one out there. The Lockett provenance didn't do any harm either. I like provenances. Edited to add. What is better? A 60 year old provenance going back to Lockett in 1956, or the knowledge of where it has been for the past 281 years, even if I am unable to account for the first 267 years of its existence.

A premium depending on the name(s) involved, but not necessarily the deciding factor when buying a coin. There's something very satisfying when you need multiple tickets to record the details plus provenance. It's also worth noting that a provenance going back a century where it was illustrated in the catalogue is also a very good indicator of how good it is relative to its peers or how rare the coin is, as only the best examples for whatever reason got imaged, even in Montagu, Murdoch etc. Certain collectors were also renowned for only collecting the best available, so the provenance helps a little here too. Quality and certain names frequently go hand in hand.

The third one down is an unfeasible operation. Webb and Son? You could live off Indian cuisine for weeks and not come close to producing commercial quantities.

Hi. Anyone have a copy of BHM for the reference number? 38mm dia, weight including clip 22.28g. Struck in Tin. Thanks.

I think it's a Kutch dhinglo, but could do with confirmation together with date etc. Weight is 12.31g and diameter is just under 20mm. Thanks.

I think they used a mixture of Kutch and Arabic, so the name is Kutch but the date is Arabic, which is why it is listed as 127*. An Urdu 7 is <, unlike the majority of arabic areas which use a v for 7. That would then make sense for 127, but the last figure in the link you posted initially also looks like a < and according to Krause this issue only goes up to AH1274 - but Krause could be wrong as it misses out things from time to time. Whatever, I think it is the correct attribution. Many thanks. All that for some thing worth a fiver!

Thanks Paddy, I'm inclined to agree, but for the life of me can't concoct a date (or part of a date) in the range 1267-1274 from the legend seen whatever the orientation. From the link I am struggling to see what constitutes 127 in either Kutch or Arabic, which if the * is a wild card, means that it is off the side The central line on the reverse is RAO SRI DESALIJI, which doesn't leave much to work out the date. And if the date is on the other side, the most obvious numerical possibility is an Arabic o, but 5 shouldn't come into it. Edit to add that if the bottom line is 127 in Arabic, then how do you make the last digit a 0,1, 2, 3 or 4?

He bought it in Sept 2013, not 2008. Current Spink book for this in VF is £1350, and £1250-1350 is in the right ballpark for this coin at current retail prices. Better than VF in parts, but mushy in others and a few too many peck marks on the reverse reduces the appeal.

But any TDorH wouldn't have any proof of purchase for any of the items. It doesn't matter whether they came from a dealer or auction if records are kept.