Peckris

I think Freeman mentions them, just doesn't give them a number - a bit like Pecks treatment of the Bird's Foot. Only AnorakMan can save us now... I don't know. As Declan says, there's a reference in Freeman, but it's been a talking point in the magazines and among collectors for decades, so I'm not sure what counts as "official". DaveG may have been the first to point out the 'broken tooth' that accompanies it though?

I was just once asked to do one. £1200 at 2000 values, including a few pieces of gold, and a few nice silver pieces (1903 florin GEF e.g.). An awful lot of scrap silver, Vicky crowns and halfcrowns mostly. It took me two hours and I asked for and got, an 1834 halfcrown F+ as payment. The few nice pieces made it worth doing, as bulking up the scrap was a bit soul-destroying.

Those look fairly standard 4th Century small bronzes (AE3 / AE4 ?) - I think the first is Constantine, and the second one (it's a bit blurred) could be Constantius. They aren't rare, but the two you have are in a nice state of preservation, and a great bit of history to have.

Nice example

Name your price! Here's my 1964 sixpence... That well-known variety "I in GRATIA missing" (still trying to get it accepted as a variety - I live in hope)

I think I was more chuffed they had actually listened to me, than annoyed that they had made an error Does anyone know off the top of their head what our DG added to the Freeman and Davies catalogue? Just out of interest, Steve, do you also draw the line at the F numbers, or do you fish out the extra Gouby's and Groom's? 1959 1/S 1944 1d 1918 farthings 1915/16 recessed ears 1912 halfpennies 1911 6d 1911 1d 1911 halfpennies 1911 farthings 1906 1/- 1904 1/- 1903 1/- off the top of my head (kinda). Sorry if I missed any, Dave! Declan's actually wrong about the 1915/16 recessed ear varieties - they have been known about, noted and collected as long as I have been, which is more years than I care to admit!

Grading Coins, Davies, ESC & Groom if you are looking at silver/CuNi only. Do you think ESC has anything to add to Davies in the 20thC? I haven't been won over by the micro-stuff (yet), but always take a quick scan through Groom to make sure I'm not giving any micro-rarities away, as we all know there are collectors out there looking for them! No, nothing, but if you collect anything before 1816 there isn't an alternative. I presume Groom is a book? Can somebody please let me know the full title as i liked to have as much reference material as possible. I think i must have spent £300 to £400 on books and magazines in the last twelve months. If you had a wish list of books that are a must to own, what would they be? Dave Groom is member of this forum (DaveG) and published two useful books on the 20th Century varieties in silver (etc) and bronze. If you PM him I'm sure he will supply you with copies at a very reasonable fee. As for wish list, it all depends where your interest lies. Gouby, Freeman, Peck, Davies, ESC .. these are all "must"s if you want to specialise in the particular area they cover. Then there's tokens, hammered, ancient - each has their specialist publication, but you don't need them all. Being new to coin collecting i like to read as much as possible so that i can soak up as much information as possible. I will buy these books. Thanks John They will set you back a bit ... a lot ... so my advice would be to consult your nearest big city library, which usually has a reference copy of Peck, and often of Freeman and ESC too. Then when you've narrowed down your specialty you could splash out on the relevant tome.

If it's in Spinks then you should be ok, but Spink don't always feature micro-varieties - my guess is that if it's not in Spink, you might be out of luck as far as insurance goes.

You can take a picture of them with your iPad's camera, then follow the upload guidelines that are a 'Sticky' topic in the Beginners forum.

See YOU Jimmy

Wow, this begs SO many questions! 3. Do publications create variety hunters on their own? Yes, this is kind of what I'm driving at, but more succinctly put by you, do publications create the variety hunter? If they do then, for the 20thC, there would only be a number less than the number of books Dave has sold, at least for the extra varieties he has identified, presumeably? I guess micro-variety could be defined as anything that sets it aside from its primary classification though, as you say, it's a very wooly boundary? From a collecting point of view, I'm thinking a variety collector would feed from a book, say Davies, and then expand on that further with the extra Groom's, and if a further catalogue arrives with even greater reduction, then I'm sure someone will collect them too, as a completist? Something I've noticed, which is quite bizarre, is that an unrecorded variety attracts considerably less attention than a catalogued one, even though you might speculate that the unrecorded is potentially rarer! You think? I wonder. 'Notoriety' (i.e. publication) breeds a reputation, based on which collectors emerge, hungry for that variety. Whereas the unrecorded variety is - almost by definition - not so well known and therefore there would be fewer collectors for it.

I have never dissolved a single coin in acid, so I have no personal empirical experience to give you a supremely irrefutable proof. However, I've seen enough alleged acid-damaged coins to now feel competent to express the opinion that IF all those separate and independent acid-damaged coins actually WERE damaged by acid (the lack of empirical proof notwithstanding), then yours falls into the same category. Verum esse ipsum factum.

They don't crop up very often, and then only in grades from Fair up to GF. If you found a Fair example for £50 you'd be doing well, but try to avoid paying much over £99. As for F or better examples, those go for far more - you're looking at a couple of hundred minimum, maybe £300 or thereabouts. Bottom line - they go for what someone is prepared to pay.

Grading Coins, Davies, ESC & Groom if you are looking at silver/CuNi only. Do you think ESC has anything to add to Davies in the 20thC? I haven't been won over by the micro-stuff (yet), but always take a quick scan through Groom to make sure I'm not giving any micro-rarities away, as we all know there are collectors out there looking for them! No, nothing, but if you collect anything before 1816 there isn't an alternative. I presume Groom is a book? Can somebody please let me know the full title as i liked to have as much reference material as possible. I think i must have spent £300 to £400 on books and magazines in the last twelve months. If you had a wish list of books that are a must to own, what would they be? Dave Groom is member of this forum (DaveG) and published two useful books on the 20th Century varieties in silver (etc) and bronze. If you PM him I'm sure he will supply you with copies at a very reasonable fee. As for wish list, it all depends where your interest lies. Gouby, Freeman, Peck, Davies, ESC .. these are all "must"s if you want to specialise in the particular area they cover. Then there's tokens, hammered, ancient - each has their specialist publication, but you don't need them all.

Wow, this begs SO many questions! 1. What do you define a micro-variety? 2. How do you distinguish between completists and rarity hunters? 3. Do publications create variety hunters on their own? My own definition would be this, taking the 1903 'open 3' penny as an example: I would almost define it as a micro-variety, except that it's fairly recognisable once you see it. But, I only wanted one because it's rare, in other words I wasn't in the slightest bit interested in being a completist (which is why the 1905 and 1937 penny varieties leave me cold, and I would define THOSE as 'micros'. Same with the 1959S shilling varieties, which to me are the ultimate in pointlessness, being neither rare, nor exactly easy to spot. But I admit, the boundaries are a bit fluid. I like to have both 1940 pennies, as one is much scarcer than the other, but on the other hand it's not the most obvious thing to see. So I suppose the answer for me is, it all depends on the variety in question, especially its rarity, before my interest is piqued.

The second part of the rule is MOST important! The first part isn't really

Would you mind explaining further Rob? Acid when, where, how? Mistake during manufacture or collector cleaning attempt? Neither. Dissolving coins in acid seems to have been quite a common prank in times gone by, when boys could walk into a shop and buy quite volatile ingredients for their "chemistry set" I've got a 1929 shilling that suffered this, and I have to say that acid was my first reaction on seeing your pictures. The first one is more interesting to me, as the grease has allowed the ghost of BRITT to appear, but whatever is where GRA should be, is something else entirely.

I know quite a few professional workers with remortgages that have them in a neutral (at best) situation, after 10-15yrs of paying their mortgages. I even know of one person who took the endowment route in the 80's, and were massively let down by the second component, to the degree that a couple of the apparently 'usual' remortgages has left them with negative equity after a 30yr spell of home ownership, and crippling repayments! The greatest irony is they still view themselves amongst the proud elite, as a homeowner? A very interesting family of sheep is this our great and proud society! The only change to the mortgage I ever contemplated and did was to almost pay it off as soon as, leaving 50p outstanding to ensure they looked after the deeds. Best thing I ever did and one of life's unforgettable pleasurable moments. Which is why when the politicians were in the dock for falsifying expenses with one claiming he had forgotten it was paid off, my obvious reaction was complete and utter I went down the "low cost endowment" route in the mid-80s too. The policy would not have paid the mortgage off, but considering I went freelance in the 90s and paid it off, then made the policy "paid up" halfway through, the resulting maturity was a nice little earner.

Not without a link, thank you. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/A-QUALITY-GEORGE-III-CARTWHEEL-1797-TWOPENCE-2d-HUGE-2-oz-COIN-/290892253787?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEWAX%3AIT&nma=true&si=Amvy0IS812cJT3KC5UUZcvu%252Bz68%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc Was it you who won it? It's a nice mid-grade example - some wear, not too much, good rim. Worth the price it went for, I'd say. Only blemish is that 9 but that's not really bad. Yes I won it! Cheers I've always wanted a nice example, one of my favorite coins! Mine too (It's not that blotchy in-hand, but you know how scans are. And it's been enlarged double size in Photoshop which doesn't do it any favours either.)

Have you got a consistent lighting set-up? Also, I don't know what the function's called, but their was an F setting on my camera that needed fine-tuning to stop the camera from focusing on the background instead of the coin (something to do with depth of field, I think? Maybe this is what's giving you some blurred shots? Nick would probably know more! The F-stop is a measure of aperture size. Large apertures give small F-numbers and vice-versa. The larger F-numbers give greater depth of field, which dictates how much of the detail nearer than and further away than the focus point appears in focus. In the case of Rob's obverse picture, adjusting the depth of field won't help because none of it is in perfect focus. It means that the "auto" focus hasn't. Autofocus works by adjusting the focus until maximum contrast is obtained within the focus region, which means that if the focus region contains a monotone colour and no features then AF can struggle. In cases such as these, I usually move the coin off-centre so that either the legend or the rim are in the focus region, so that the AF system can see some contrast. Having said that, I don't believe that the Nikon AF system is particularly good. Unsurprisingly, I concur. But I can also see an advantage in having a background with detail such as Stuart uses. If your Nikon has a LiveView mode, try using that as you can move the focus rectangle to any part of the view. This might be difficult to ascertain. I lost the manual ages ago. I think it did a runner courtesy of Lord Lucan riding Shergar along with my copy of Murdoch part 1. You might be surprised what you can find on the Internet... Remarkably there appears to be over 100 web pages devoted to manuals or problem solutions for an obsolete camera which I will need to peruse! A lot of people must have a lot of spare time to waste as you wouldn't think that people could get so passionate about what is essentially a tool. You should register for dpreview.com and watch the passionate arguments about whether Nikon or Canon is better

Not without a link, thank you. http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/A-QUALITY-GEORGE-III-CARTWHEEL-1797-TWOPENCE-2d-HUGE-2-oz-COIN-/290892253787?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEWAX%3AIT&nma=true&si=Amvy0IS812cJT3KC5UUZcvu%252Bz68%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc Was it you who won it? It's a nice mid-grade example - some wear, not too much, good rim. Worth the price it went for, I'd say. Only blemish is that 9 but that's not really bad.

Thanks for the link guys The twopence is a nice VF with a good rim, and I see it went for £73. Fair price - not too high, not too low. About right.

What size is it? And what metal does it look to be made from? The design is Pistrucci's famous "George and the Dragon" first used in the early 19th Century. It was last used on crown-sized coins in 1951, but it is also the regular reverse on gold sovereigns. The only 1983 sovereigns were proofs, and that doesn't look (on the face of it) to be one of those. It may indeed be an oversize model, as those have been produced since 1971, but they aren't usually dated. So size and metal are important here.

Have you got a consistent lighting set-up? Also, I don't know what the function's called, but their was an F setting on my camera that needed fine-tuning to stop the camera from focusing on the background instead of the coin (something to do with depth of field, I think? Maybe this is what's giving you some blurred shots? Nick would probably know more! The F-stop is a measure of aperture size. Large apertures give small F-numbers and vice-versa. The larger F-numbers give greater depth of field, which dictates how much of the detail nearer than and further away than the focus point appears in focus. In the case of Rob's obverse picture, adjusting the depth of field won't help because none of it is in perfect focus. It means that the "auto" focus hasn't. Autofocus works by adjusting the focus until maximum contrast is obtained within the focus region, which means that if the focus region contains a monotone colour and no features then AF can struggle. In cases such as these, I usually move the coin off-centre so that either the legend or the rim are in the focus region, so that the AF system can see some contrast. Having said that, I don't believe that the Nikon AF system is particularly good. No, I think he's talking about an F button (for Focus) such as I have on my Lumix FZ camera. Nothing to do with F-stops, I would think. There never was one for my camera (unless you count the almost useless Quick Start Guide). The manual itself I had to download from Panasonic's site, all 200 pages of it in PDF form...

Not without a link, thank you.