Red Riley

Will try and post a few images in here when I get time, but I have: 1918KN GVF with some remnants of mint lustre. Toning is heading towards mid-dark brown and not at all KN like. Quite well-struck but a bit 'fluffy'. Good portrait. Heavily ghosted. 1918H GVF+. No lustre, but a mid-brown colour (without the KN red). Extremely well struck, no ghosting. It may be that it takes some years of circulation for the fully toned colour to appear. Against this however, I also have: 1919H fairly dismal condition - if anybody has my book, you can see it on p20 (plug over!). This can best be described as a kind of dull brown, the colour of well matured cow muck. In my recollection, this was a fairly common tone for 19Hs but not 18Hs which were almost invariably a very dark brown, almost black. The same applied to 12Hs. I think that what we will find is that, apart perhaps from KNs, there is no consistency across the board. I also think that on the evidence produced so far in this thread (thanks guys!), Heaton's used the same blanks as the RM, whilst King's Norton supplied their own and perhaps topped up the Royal Mint's supplies when these became low. Would be very interesting if Dave could dig out the Coin Monthly article.

Now you come to mention it, my 'main collection' 1912 penny has reddish lustre which is very different from the lustre on my 12H. I wonder how far this supply agreement went back - I have a distinctly KN coloured 1893 in a bag somewhere. Personally, I think chemical analysis of different hued bronze coins could still yield a lot of useful information, such as establishing the geographical origin of the metal. Finally, truly uncirculated 18/19 H/KNs do come up from time to time, but like most of us, I've never been able to afford one!

All interesting stuff. I think dies were used to death virtually everywhere in the period 1915-20 and the quality of the end product can be dreadful, and you may be right that the two private mints tried to eke every bit of use out of their dies, just to make that tiny bit of extra profit. I also have a theory though that the alloys scarcely differed throughout the entire period of production (apart from those notified by the mint), and it is the source of the copper and possibly where it was smelted that creates the different colour - i.e. the level and chemical composition of impurities and the proportion of these removed during smelting. It's all a bit complicated but I might post a thread about it one day. King's Norton clearly used a very consistent source of supply, possibly with some ferrous contamination in the copper.

I'm a bit older than average apparently. Oh go on then, I'm 54.

I don't know what period you're talking about Red? I can tell you that from 1968 to 1970, when I used to take my pocket money into the banks and get bags of pennies to look through - these were by no means scarce in my experience. I used to save them, plus 1926, and 1922, plus genuine rarities if I was lucky enough to find them (a fair few 19H, a tub of 12H, one 18KN, one 1953 - interestingly no 02LT or 18H, and though every dealer was selling 50 and 51 they NEVER turned up in change!) . It's just embarrassing how many of them all I ended up with, all filed away for future "investment" (hah!). I'm betting so many other schoolkids and collectors were doing the same, they are now no scarcer in lower grades than some of the commoner dates. And as for BU, well all I can say is, I've seen a few, but rarely a BU 1930 (in fact, I'm not sure I ever have). Bottom line, 8 million does not a scarce penny make! To me, and this is my own personal opinion only, the 1932 penny 'mystique' is just a joke. If I were nominating rare BU pennies I would say 1915 and 1916, 1926, 1930. Snap! The period I was rifling through all the pennies in my father's shop was exactly that, 68-70 (71 actually). I found a few 02 LTs, 18Hs, 19Hs and amazingly a 1918 Royal Mint with 35% lustre (but never a KN or a 53). One other Saturday boy used to collect as well and we used to scrap over the 'rarities'. Of the 'straight' dates (if you ignore anything genuinely rare, or before 1895) 26 and 32 were always the scarcest, we really didn't bother with anything else. In the cold light of day, neither are genuinely rare, just scarcer than the others. Changing tack slightly, I think what makes Hs and KNs so unusual in the high grades is that most people that collected new - that have ever collected new, right back to the Greeks - are just like we were, 12 year old kids and nobody told them about the little marks to the left of the date. Hence, one new penny per year would, unless they were very lucky have been the bog standard Royal Mint issue. Ah, happy days...

Have you got a value on it please Chris? It's not in stonking condition (or perhaps the photo is just blurred), but you might get £10 or so for it. Actually fairly common, but quit a mark up on a miniscule bit of silver!

Crikey, 3 posts on the trot! I can see where you are coming from but I don't necessarily agree. 1930 and 1931 were more common coins. Anybody collecting at or before decimalisation will concur with that. The mechanics of first hand collection (i.e. the people collecting at the time) meant that fewer were put aside in high grade i.e. in years when less were minted (and the figures issued by the mint for this period look about right), some collectors - the less tenacious - just didn't find one and gave up, hence there have always been less available for the collector. Some years are exceptional and a 'goldrush' effect takes over e.g. 1950 and '51 where the word went around that the coins were rare and virtually every single one still exists in EF and above, but this didn't happen in the thirties. It may sometimes appear that e.g. high grade 1932 pennies are more common than they are, but with a higher price, a higher potential for subsequent growth and an element of realising profits, the market may just be more efficient at flushing them out. Hope this makes sense!

Yes, yes, yes. Agree with all of that. The asking price for anything slabbed seems to be astronomical compared with the market. Use your own eyes and refuse to pay ridiculous prices for coins. For 'slab' read 'bubble'.

Well, I don't know if that is what they would pay for it, I suspect not, but it is what the website says the value is according to them for this individual coin. The population report is, I believe 2nd out of about 7. I paid £80 for it from a certain Gentleman in Notting Hill. As you may know, he doesn't grade anything above AU so BU it isn't, 'cos BU doesn't really exist for old pennies in the truest sense of the word, but it is very nice - it's what I would accept as BU. Sheldon ? Well (here I make the horse noise with my lips) earlier I posted an NGC64 RD as UNC 82 ??? Just seems such a big difference of opinion, no other 'ordinary' penny in that reign seems to be worth more than £60 (1913) and wondering if, like the 1915 and 16 it is actually rarer on the ground in tip top than billed ? Still got nowhere near a BU 15/16, my Avatar is the closest and that's nicely toned but miles off. Rgds. Blimey... I bought a real corker from the same gentleman in 2001 for £33. Reasonable to say that prices have gone up considerably since then, but still looks a good buy. These were not common coins at all, and you could wait for months to get one in your change; looks as if the market is beginning to notice. In the meantime I am pleased with my investment (cf. stocks and shares anyone?). As you probably know, Michael Gouby is to pennies what Colin Cooke was to farthings. To understand his grading, just substitute PAS (practically as struck) for Unc. but he grades less than 1 in 100 lustrous coins this way, so anything carrying that description is pretty special.

These all look a pretty decent price. The 1871 is VF+ to me, not GVF+ but still a decent coin and well worth a punt. I just wish the picture of the 1875H was clearer, but if that really is lustre, then the price doesn't look at all bad. Similarly the 1864 which I would give GVF, perhaps a bit more but maybe not as far as NEF. Would like to see it in the hand to check out that edge damage. Wish I had the money right now...

I suspect though, that the pennies have been well and truly scanned by now and anything remotely valuable has long been whisked away.

I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. A nice tale, but one I think I would have remembered as I was collecting at the time, but it fails to stir a chord in the old memory cells. Would have been more feasible if a copy of the advert had been provided. Sadly, I think this is someone trying to create a sensation and Wikipedia would do well to check the article. On the other hand (and I believe I've posted about this before), there were a number of extremely good forgeries going the rounds a few years ago where a 1935 penny had been cleverly re-cut by carefully lowering the height of the exergue field and re-cutting the 5 into a 3. The only easy way to tell was that the re-cut 5 was a fraction of a degree off vertical when compared with a genuine 1933. Still a good try, and a genuine forgery(!) would now be worth quite a bit of money.

Going way off beam here, but I've just spent an idle 20 minutes going through your excellent site. I hope you don't mind me saying, but your paintings section really ought to have something by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Try Proserpine, Mona Vana or The Blessed Damozel.

The best fake 50p story I ever heard were the ones made of ice. Apparently they would quite satisfactorily operate an old-style gas meter and when the collector came round to retrieve the money, instead of the box of 50ps he was expecting, all he got was a puddle. Not the sort of thing you could collect though... Probably apocryphal but made me laugh.

I think Spinks' is a good start, but as a youngster with a few pence or at best a few pounds to spend, the prices will be meaningless. So why not get an old one! All the information is there, it's just that the prices are out of date. eBay will be awash with these things at, I would guess a couple of quid plus postage.

The first explanation I read was that the figures are the number of coins issued into circulation in a year. "That makes sense", I thought. They had loads left over from last year and didn't use them all up until Autumn, so there's not much time to make coins with this year's date. The same thing seems to happen with modern coinage today... sometimes you don't see new coins until Christmas. But now it seems that they carried on making coins with last year's date. Are they doing this to eke out the last useful life from last year's dies before making new ones? My take on this, for what it's worth, is that the mint make coins dated the correct year up until 31 December and then almost always change to the new year's date the following day (there are exceptions like 1967 pennies, cartwheel pennies etc.). However, there may still be a large number of the previous year's coins in storage at the mint awaiting issue, to which the new year's coins are added; the whole lot is not then issued until say, 20 January and hence go down on the figures as the following year's issue. As I understand it, the mint, like most factories makes their products in batches which can have quite an effect on how the figures are recorded. Let's go back to the 1869 penny; the mint starts its final batch of 1868 pennies on 15 December, keeps knocking them out until 31 December. On the stroke of midnight 1869, new dies are brought in and the pennies carry on being produced until 5 January when it switches to making farthings. All the pennies are then issued on 15 January. This whole batch would therefore have gone down on the 1869 figures. If the final batch of 1868s had been completed by the end of October, then the anomaly would not have happened. The only time where this theory falls down is where there is no production of a particular denomination in a given year, but the mint continued to produce the denomination until late on the previous year. Theoretically therefore a figure could have been given for coins issued in a year in which none bear that date, and I can't recall a case where this ever happened. Another exception which has occurred to me concerns 1860 bronze which seemed to turn up in far greater numbers than those provided by the mint. Frankly, James Watt (who produced most of these coins) were the 19th century equivalent of British Leyland and I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were still minting coins dated 1860 right up until June. And there were a fair few Friday afternoon coins too!

Yes, happy birthday (I think I know how many - and it's a damn site less than me!). Long-haul flights always give me something similar, and I know I'm not the only one. As for the car, have you tried the mk. 1 version of air-conditioning i.e. opening the windows?

I agree with all that, with a slight wobble on number 2. I guess I have approached it from a slightly idealistic perspective in that I regard grading as grading and damage/other shortcomings as er... damage/other shortcomings. Good dealers in my experience, and to be fair, the vast bulk of them come into this category grade in a similar way. But you are right, the odd dealer will downgrade without going the extra mile of giving the all-important additional information. Us collectors are a pretty straightforward lot, and I have yet to meet one who likes this approach, preferring to buy from a dealer who divorces grading from other factors. As Chris says, this is covered in the book. Hope you like it (I'll even sign one for you if you buy it via Chris!).

It certainly is an "Early" George III Crown! I have to say I feel a tad sorry for the guy. Other pointers seem to indicate that he has some idea of what he's doing - just lost the plot at the crucial moment.

Photos would be needed, but if the British coins are in normal circulated condition, then metal value only I'm afraid. The silver threepences though have a 50% silver content, but still doesn't add up to much. Depending on condition again, the Indian and Swiss coins may be worth more.

It's a very dark image - I had to Photoshop it to see anything - so most people won't have known what you were driving at. The 2 appears to be re-stamped over something, probably another 2, but the level of magnification needed and the low resolution means that it is very fuzzy. I don't have another 1862 halfpenny with which to compare it, but the dates on early bronze was frequently all over the place, and looking at the picture in Freeman, it appears that the slight slant may be normal for the issue. Broadly speaking, coins minted from dies where a number has been re-cut over the same number, are not regarded as major, or in most cases even minor varieties but there is no hard and fast definition of what constitutes a variety, so if you want it to be one, then it is! Unlikely however that it will ever be worth much more than normal.

There is also a rumour that a lot of them were lost on a ship en route to Australia.

Maybe a few pence for the Victorian coins but really not worth the postage. Sadly, the world is full of coins like this and nobody wants them.

For the British coins that you have photograped, unless there is some detail that I am unable to see, the answer appears to be 'no'. I know nothing whatever about the Danish coin, but the overwhelming odds are that it too, is pretty much valueless. If you do not want to keep the coins yourself, may I suggest that you donate them to a child, who usually find old coins of much interest. Just don't tell them they might be worth a fortune one day!

Found an interesting forgery today (but have since spent it) - 1997 with the Maklouf obverse and the three lions on the reverse. The edge lettering was slightly wobbly but not too bad. The thing about it though, was that it was in 'Fair' condition and this was not due to the forgers sleight of hand, but simply wear on what was presumably a softer metal than the original. I guess it just shows how little the general public care about forgeries.