Red Riley

Your wish is my command. If my computer's not playing silly b*ggers, the second image is the ME. Quality may not be great in order to fit within the size limits. Yes, it's playing silly b*ggers, it told me that was going to be 10 cm. across... You should however be able to download and enlarge if you have the right equipment.

Sometimes it's best not to play Aunt Sally, and although I'm now a forum god, I think the capital on the pronoun is a little excessive.

It seems to be an incontrovertible rule that anybody incoherently selling utter crap has to charge an arm and a leg for the postage.

He is on record as saying that he wants to style himself George VII in honour of his grandfather.

You are probably right here. We know for example that the vast bulk of 1951 pennies went to Bermuda (I think it was Bermuda) and 1950s to Northern Ireland. We only know this because they are entirely separate areas and comparatively easy to isolate what is in circulation. The same must happen to all other coins but because there are no physical boundaries to cross, the whereabouts of issue remains entirely unknown. It must therefore be odds on that all the MEs were released in one area, but at this distance in time it is impossible to tell where this was.

Now, where did I put that trombone...?

I hate predictive texting and refuse to use it after agreeing to meet some friends at 'The Cock Tavern' (OK, bad enough in itself). When I checked what I'd sent I was meeting them at the 'Anal Tavern'! Bizarre.

Dave, the first thing you must do is weigh it (should be c. 14.14g give or take say, 0.1g). If it comes up short send it straight back.

I'm not sure I entirely agree here. Any fool can spot an H or a KN but it takes practice to isolate an ME from the ordinary effigy. Coin collectors are like anybody else and their level of interest and thence skill will vary widely. Only a tiny minority will have had the interest to buy or borrow a publication which shows them what to look out for. My change collecting of pennies as it related to MEs went in three stages; 1) I had no knowledge of there being two varieties of 1926, although I did know about Hs and KNs; 2) I found out that there were two types but initially thought they had a small head like 1928-36. I hadn't picked up on 1927 being a different design; 3) Somebody pointed out to me what I should be looking for and after a while I could recognise one at ten paces. As £400 and 1949 Threepence have pointed out, pre-internet collectors were often lone wolves and it took time to garner information about the subject. Many will have learnt more by borrowing Seaby's (now Spink's) from the library, as I did, but library books have to be returned and you can't learn everything in the two week period before the fines start to kick in. My point is that because of the level of skill involved there were always going to be less people looking out for MEs, although I suspect that like KNs (not Hs) the majority were eventually harvested from circulation but as this took a long time, they were typically in worn condition.

The beading will often give it away. On a circulation coin, the angle of the edge can often be a little rough and contain a minute amount of spare metal whereas the proof will appear to be much better finished in this area.

To give you a little more background here, as I say, my checking through change lasted roughly two and a half years and it was actually quite a large scale opration. With my father running a busy shop, I was able to lean on him to get quite a large number of pennies from the bank - maybe £5 or even more every week, plus whatever came into the shop, so you could maybe estimate that I checked 15-20,000 or more pennies from 1969 to 1971. Not one ME, not one KN and not one penny from the fifties, so it may be that by then most of the interesting coins had already been sucked out of circulation leaving just the dross behind. Or possibly somebody at the bank was pulling the best stuff in their lunch break!

I would have to say that this is over 40 years ago now and my 18-20 is not much more than inspired guesswork. There was a pal of mine who also used to wade through his coins and I know that he never found one either, so perhaps they really were that rare. Fair to say though that a disproportionate number would ultimately have been taken out of circulation by collectors but whether this was significant or not, I just can't say.

The best estimate I have seen (and I have no idea where I got it from) was of about 400,000 ME's. I have to say that although I collected avidly from change for maybe 2 1/2 years, I never saw a 26 ME, but at the same time must have encountered 18-20 1926 ordinary effigies, so read into that what you will. I think it is fair to say that if the only 1926 pennies issued equated to the small number of ME's then they would be far more common in higher grade. People (especially kids) used to put aside an example of each date and for 1926 this was most likely to have been an ordinary effigy. Variety collecting was in its infancy then and most collectors would be either unaware of the variety or just weren't that concerned. Added to this the fact that being produced from new dies which were presumably only brought into use when the old ones were worn out, the ME's were likely to have been issued last and quite conceivably not until 1927 by which time most collectors already had their BU 1926. A fair bit of conjecture there, but it does seem to make sense and give a reasonable explanation of this coin's rarity.

I do have some sympathy with him but perhaps the way to have dealt with it would have been an abject apology, refund your money and give you a £10 voucher off your next purchase. Not in accordance with the letter of the law I know, but it may go some way towards pouring oil on troubled waters. You knew it was a mistake. He knew that you knew it was a mistake, so there are probably some grounds for a friendly handshake and move on. If it was a mega-corporation (or perhaps a large dealer that we all know...) I'd suggest you see your solicitor but a little guy like this? Hmmm...

Depends on your definition of BU! Deja vu? What's that? Deja vu? What's that?.......

There does seem to be some disparity between the content and the potential readership. For me, this month's is a prime example. It contains a fairly interesting article on brass threepenny bits which I read; a rather long piece taking a look at gate type reverses on Roman coins which I started to read and ultimately just ended up by skimming through and one man's experiences metal detecting in a field near Tewksbury which was interesting enough but rather like looking at somebody else's holiday snaps. The rest included three articles on banknotes, which is fine if it's your thing - it isn't mine; an article on British colonial issues in Africa and another on New Zealand tradesmen's tokens. The final piece was a look at platinum as a coinage metal illustrated with pictures of Beyonce and Paris Hilton which ultimately made the cover look a bit like OK magazine. I suspect this final article would have limited appeal to any regular member of this message board. So, out of 9 main articles I found one interesting and two moderately so. The rest were the sort of thing I would only read if faced with an extended period in a dentist's waiting room and even then only if somebody had pinched Country Life. As an aside, I know that advertising is the lifeblood of such magazines, and without it there would be no periodicals at all, but isn't three pages of advertising from Coincraft perhaps two pages too much? I suppose the question is, am I a typical British coin collector? The evidence from this forum and from events such as coin fairs is that I am, in fact I would say my range of interest is wider than most. I therefore find it hard to work out quite who the target readership is. Of course, the answer may be that the genuine collector of British coins is too small a constituency to warrant an entire magazine to him or her self, so it has to attract as wide a readership as possible. But this runs the risk that by widening the potential market, you end up by alienating those who you would regard as your core readership. Now, I don't wish Coin News or its publishers ill, and there may be some truth in the argument that in restricting their articles to largely those covering British issues of the last 2.3 millennia there would be insufficient material and the same topic might need to be covered over and over again. Is this however, something that would really bother a more committed readership? Is it preferable to have two very similar articles on Victorian sixpences in a 5 year run rather than one on Victorian sixpences and another on say, Outer Mongolian silver issues of the 1990s? It also strikes me that the pool of writers for such comparatively narrow subject matter might be rather shallow making it difficult to source appropriate material without overworking the willing horses. If Bob has stayed with me this far (or indeed even started…), I wonder if he could enlighten us on American coin magazines, especially if there are any that deal almost exclusively with U.S. coins (i.e. the equivalent of what we would appear to want here). If so, how do they cope with publishing a magazine which has a comparatively narrow subject matter? Are articles repeated? Sorry to go on, but it does seem to me that we need a magazine which reflects our interests within the hobby, and at present it is far from clear that we have one.

Not to mention the Duraglit surface!

Petrol?................. Check Oily rag?............... Check Worthless coin?......... Check

I had this vague recollection of hearing somewhere that the original grades were poor, fair, fine, very fine, extremely fine and that was it. I guess the ancients of coin collecting were more concerned with eye appeal than with slight wear to Britannia's fingers. It might also suggest that the definition of EF has become less stringent over time.

They were still legal tender at the time, so I'm sticking with my 'pissed mint worker lobs old sixpence into blank hopper' hypothesis. People tell me I have a deeply unromantic nature...

It was certainly about before then. I remember it back to the 1960s but it's never really had any official standing which makes me think it's a comparatively recent phenomenon. I wonder if an (even) older coiny than me has any recollection?

Strangely neither I nor many of the other dealers that I speak to use Spink for pricing purposes. What I do use it for is to check the price of one coin against another e.g. in my opinion a 1916 half crown in EF is worth £x; I have just acquired a 1917 in similar condition, will this be worth more, the same, or less? The actual prices, I tend to ignore.

Personally I think if it's one of those things we can over-analyse. I suppose that Spinks' Unc for currency pieces is what, MS66? But by the same token does their FDC equal MS70? If it does then I would guess that many of the prices they list are below market value. Perhaps the guide is produced as much on gut feel as on hard market evidence, which is in itself a very erratic yardstick. As I said, don't take it too seriously...

Well it's always been around from my recollection but I do have a hunch that it is pre-dated by both Spink's and Seaby's who with that special kind of snobbery reserved by august English institutions refuse to accept that the world didn't stop the day they were established.

I think the problem is that Spink's don't acknowledge the BU grade.