Leaderboard

Very pleased with this 1874 penny - F65 in top UNC grade with probably 90% lustre, ever so lightly toning. Just £250 as a BIN. These are obviously not desperately rare, but they don't turn up every 5 minutes, and definitely not in this grade. Looking back at other sales of similar grade, the price compares very favourably.

1959 Gillick Sovereign

Sorry, but that's totally wrong. 1) he's sport, for which there are much more relaxed rules about impartiality, and 2) he can say what he likes on Twitter, where he's not representing the BBC. Would I say the same if I didn't 100% agree with him? Don't know...

Talking of 8+I, keep looking out for the very rare 1873 (sic) 8+I too. Unrecorded originally in Freeman, it is now mentioned in Appendix 4 of the reprinted version. Dracott records 3 specimens seen, and here's a fourth: (obverse to follow)

1877 Young Victoria Sovereign

BBC. Impartial. Sport. The BBC, being a license financed, non ad revenue, broadcaster, brand names and logos are always edited out wherever possible, even to the extent of food brand identifiers being clumsily censored by use of black tape on containers in cookery shows. Sport? Come footy post match analysis; any manager, player, associated pundit, loon with a view, is shown standing before a board festooned with ads for all manner of companies and products. Why is this?

1957 Gillick Sovereign

Obverse: @secret santa Richard, if you want to use these for your rare halfpennies website, be my guest!

Completed listings shows it last closed at £155 so I suspect, whatever the seller ID, she's now so familiar people are happy to have a bit of fun at her expense. Who here remembers the slightly faulty decimal coin she asked a million for because she wanted to buy a chippy?

Yeah, these holes you know, they tend to wear their way right through the metal, naturally.

A purely selfish move to take images and catalogue the few hundred I have and the hard task to identify these crazy characters has motivated me to start a thread so that some others could join in on my confusion with these illegal entities which now have their own fan club, admittedly mostly the American Market. But I know many of you have some, if not a lot, and thought you might help me out. The Only reference I have are some past papers from the BNS and a book by R Coleman and I am in need of help finding a book??/ by Atkins that the americans are always referring to . Hope it's OK to press on ?

Apart from the size of the gap below the bust and the bottom of the veil, the position of DEI GRATIA is different and the nose, mouth, chin and neck are different: I haven't counted the teeth around the edge (yet!).

Because it is the national broadcaster that we are forced to pay for, on the basis that it stays impartial.

I have been looking for a "wide gap" 1888 florin for a while, and finally got one today. Quite a bargain, too, as it cost less than what I paid for the much more common "narrow gap" variety 2 years ago (shown below for comparison).

1976 Machin Sovereign Taken with a mixture of incident and axial lighting, this time.

This was a surprise find in a lot picked up in auction last week - same obverse die mentioned in last post but with model half dollar reverse. Rogers 2467.

Transfer to small dipping bowls. Garnish with chopped parsley and dill. Serves 4-6 people.

I only have experience of toning bronze, but an important factor must be common to silver, namely that of temperature. I have a lamp that's on a lot, with a compact fluorescent lamp in it, mounted base down. If you slide a penny that someone has 'cleaned' in between the glass coils, it's supported by its edges, and sits at a nice temperature, and re-toning is surprisingly fast, and even on both sides of the coin. Acetone first is a good idea.

All my florins from 1912 to 1919 have a weak strike on the upper shield, but in my case the best is the 1915:

And the more common one OBV 2 with the better struck obverse ,just back from NGC MS64.

Must admit, I was relieved to see that the envelope contained the coin that I purchased.

Do not cease hostilities or cede an inch to Russia as it would give them a breathing space. Your perceived weakness will result in them resuming their expansion when they have had time to regroup. They need to be forced out and the west needs to support them in this. By all means set up a demilitarised zone once ejected which could be run by the UN if necessary, but do not give them a territorial gain as a reward for invading. A wide enough buffer zone would give them something that potentially removes any NATO troops from the Ukrainian border, and also means that Russia couldn't sit on Ukraine's border, waiting to invade. Russia would likely never accept this as it would interfere with their centuries old habit of invading their neighbours. It's what they do best. Russia has killed many millions of Ukrainians in the past simply for being Ukrainian and would do so again given they look down on anybody from outside of Moscow/St. Petersburg. Do not encourage them in doing a rerun by handing over people who don't want to be part of Russia. When Russia is taking children as 'orphans' and resettling them by adoption with Russian families, it isn't because many of them didn't have parents. Russia's biggest problem is demographics, and continuing the conflict is exacerbating this. Every generation they have a cull of young males due entirely to their empire building. Maybe only 15000 in Afghanistan over 10 years, but Ukraine with 10x that number to date has set them back at least a generation in development. Russia is a cancer on humanity and hopefully will implode and break up at the end of all this.

After my mistaken identification of the 8+J above, I decided to check my other two that I had down as reverse K. Turns out that I have both an 8 and a 9, reverse I. So F313, F314, F315 crossed off in quick succession. A further search on eBay, turned up this one, which arrived this morning. Reverse K. ? Paired with 9. F317.