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I felt that I contributed too much detail on the thread on Half pennies showing all the overstamps and errors I had found in my own collection collected in the last 6 years. Every coin has come from eBay and I have never attended an auction and I have enjoyed the challenge of finding errors already discovered and covered comprehensively by M Goulby in the specialised edition Bronze Pennies from 1860 to 1901 and others mentioned in numerous excellent websites created and administered by long time members of this forum and others who I am unsure if members. I wanted to photograph and record all my examples for my own catalogue in readiness for donation to the Trust I hope then it will be used after my demise to help them sell off my collection. I may replicate examples in other places with this in mind. I will use the prefixes used by Goulby and so that I can start to remember them the Freeman nomenclature. I find errors surprisingly interesting, Perhaps because of the turmoil in the transition to Bronze from Copper they illustrate a somewhat chaotic time at the mint. In previous discussions others have explained some of the problems there is an interesting back story which involves a lot of politics and a great deal of personal intrigue in the life of L C Wyon the designer of the new reverse and obverse. The royal mint seems to have been undergoing a lot of changes which may contribute to some of the story and sadly most f the records for this period are lost because of a fire in the records office of the Royal mint in the 19th C. If you feel you would rather this be included in some other thread then just let me know and I will stop and relocate. It takes a lot of time to photograph and record these errors. More than anything else I would be eternally grateful for your own examples that will help verify any previously unlisted. This goes for the half pennies in particular which do not get the same limelight as the penny. So please add your own Thanks

I would like to start a new and I think, important feed. I want to ask you to consider if we are losing out on greater understanding of coins in our collections because people are hesitant to be upfront about oddities, errors, over stamping, and other varieties? I have many examples of 1 type of strange coin in my collections it may be for example an 1860 penny where there is what appears to be an R under a B in BRITT. I sit around looking and looking for pieces to confirm this but hesitate to ask others. Am I hesitating because I want to be the first to find something and as a result miss out as a group activity to compare and share? If I look at a coin and see something odd I have a tendency either to pass it off as a singular error when it could be something others have seen. In the spirit of openness I would like to start to share my strange coins and hope that I do not upset anyone but undermining some economy associated with collecting, simply because I would hope think that we collect because of interest in the subject not just how much some coin is worth. I will begin with the 1846 shilling with three colons after REG :. The R under B in the 1860 penny the Possible B under R half penny 1862 could be just a die run but seemingly corresponding to the "strange sticky out bit" commonly seen on 1861 and 1862 half pennies in BRITT.

I should like to ask the newer collectors, of which I am one having only started four years back, a few questions. How easy do you think it is to get access to information on coins you want to collect? I find that reference books seem to choose arbitrarily which varieties they want to list and which they do not want to list. there appears to be no reason for the source of this discrepancy other than whether one person who has a variety want to push the books like SPINK to include it. It does not seem to be that they only choose the most common because some are listed as "PU possibly unique" it would be more useful to have access to the information in wikipedia at least that way if we searched for a coin type we could get some information. One long term member feels that there are just too many varieties to list in anything other than an encyclopedia. It seems that the science of digital photography and greater access to microscopes as well as "increasing number of collectors???" may be presenting too many new listings. I wonder then if we each of us find them why we cannot just list them as wikicoin pages. It seems clear that the books available in print form cannot keep up new findings so why can we not do it ourselves. I believe that you just have to register to begin making new events or pages. It may be that when a letter is put over another letter that it does not tell us much on the individual level put surely if there are enough pieces of information we might learn something new about the making of the coin or its history. Let's face it records have been lost by fires and the death of a collector who might have spent ages looking for things the only way to change that then is not to rely on the British Museum, or the collection of Cambridge or Oxford but to make the information freely available.