Stuff to Make Us Laugh

[Stuff to Make Us Laugh]

11 hours ago, Paddy said:

GJ is best known (apparently) for his Wicked Willie series...

[Stuff to Make Us Laugh]

Is that the same Joliffe who collaborated with Terry Pratchett on a hilarious book about cats? (The Unadulterated Cat??)

[Old Time Dealers-Reminising]

On 4 June 2019 at 4:28 PM, The Coin Cabinet said:

Going back to my Father with his collection which he felt was complete after 40 years travelling the country - he'd tended to take the Seabys book and try to obtain the lowest minted in number for each denomination of UK coins, not a mean feat?! Some, because of their rarity were impossible to acquire but his pride and joy was an 1839 milled edge Halfcrown of which, if I remember correctly was rarity 6 or 7 in Seabys with only a few examples known! When he retired he sold his beloved collection so he and Mum could travel and enjoy their final years, which they did in style! Happy memories!

Since my first post I have been searching for the picture of us at the Cumberland in Marble Arch 1969, found it!

Ada is holding the cup we won for best stand in show! My Father is on the right. I don't remember my chubby cheeks?!

Terry

I remember that Coin Monthly used to have a regular feature on dealers, featuring a different one every month.

[1971 £.s.d. to Decimal converter.]

No, I never saw those, or even an advert for them. Possibly rare?

[air traffic controller's speech]

3 hours ago, copper123 said:

Another of her great boobs was telling the tory conference we import 70% of our cheese (it is in fact 7%) a quick check on google would have told her she was making an idiot of herself in front of millions .

Maybe we should rename her the tory dianne abbot

7% ? Considering the vast array of exotic French/Italian/Greek etc cheeses available that seems rather low. Unless of course they count DAirylea as cheese (surely not? )

[Minting Of New £1 Coin]

On 4 June 2019 at 2:41 PM, craigy said:

didnt someone do a rather in depth study and we came to the conclusion they were not errors just tolerances in the mass production varying 

 

That would lead me to expect a 50/50 (ish) outcome - 3% is not random!

[Minting Of New £1 Coin]

https://www.fleur-de-coin.com/articles/coin-striking

It's done at the same time. I would therefore infer that the collar on one particular die pairing was incorrectly aligned and has caused nearly 3% of the mintage (if your sample is accurate) to have that particular pointing.

[Ebay's Worst Offerings]

10 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

Thanks Chris - if you do get the time, that'd be great. If you're anything like me though, it'll turn up when you're looking for something else - and you'll think "how the hell did it get there?"

It was actually easy in the end - I just did a Spotlight search for 'Declan' and there it was! Proves that good naming brings its own rewards. Unfortunately, after eBay changed its search software, it became rather more complicated, but FWIW, here is Declan's technique:

 

Perhaps I should share one of my trade secrets.  Don’t tell anyone.  This is a filtering mechanism that I have developed over many years, and tonight, it reduced the list of what was presented to me from nearly a quarter of a million results to 66,000.  That means that 75% of the list is removed before I even see it, and if you sort your query by Ending Soonest, it means that I really can have a quick look through eBay to see if there is anything finishing tonight that takes my fancy.

 

Make a cup of tea at this point if you’re still with me – I am going to go into some detail.  All the examples I’ll use are my own personal preferences but I do understand that what I consider to be tat, others may consider to be treasure, so do forgive my ruthlessness.

 

I start by listing everything in the British Coins category, sorted by Ending Soonest.  Tonight it was around 225,000 items.

 

I use a three-stage process to reduce this number to something a little more manageable.

 

• Stage 1:  eliminate things I don’t want to see, like 50ps and 20ps.
•  
• Stage 2: eliminate sellers whose tat I don’t want to see
•  
• Stage 3: set a maximum price so I don’t see things I can’t afford. 
•  

 

 

Stage 1: Eliminate terms used in an items description, in my instance, this could be things like “50p, 20p, pound, proof, gold”.  You do this in the top search bar in eBay, using the syntax:

 

-(xxx,yyy,zzz)

 

I don’t want to see decimal coins, so a lot of my exclusions are dates.  You cannot use wildcards.  You used to be able to, but that’s a different story…

 

Soon, after playing with this a little bit, you’ll run up against a character limit.  eBay think that it is 100 characters, but I have found a workaround to extend that limit to 300 characters by enclosing three separate 100 character strings in three separate bracket pairs:

 

-(100 characters here) -(100 more here) -(and another 100 here)

 

Go one character over and it goes a little bit haywire, but you can always go back a page in your browser to recover it.  300 characters will keep you going for a while, but eventually, you’ll run up against that limit too, so you’ll want to use your 300 in the most effective way.  Some terms exclude thousands of items, and some only exclude a few.  “50p” excludes 35,000 records, while “brooch” only knocks out 127, so I rank the search term exclusions by how many records they exclude, and only use up my 300 on those that are worth using.  As we are limited by character, a small term, like “50p” (3 characters), is a lot more economical than a long term, like “enamelled” (10 characters).

 

This is where it can get complicated, and I leave it up to you, and the level of your own Asperger’s how far you want to go with this.  It gets complicated because items have more than one word in their descriptions, and you may already have eliminated an item with an exclusion already used.  Take gold sovereigns, for instance.  A search using “gold” brings up 6,500 results, so we can knock out 6,500 items by including “gold” in our exclusion string.  A search using “sovereign” brings up 4,000 results, but we cannot exclude a further 4,000 by using “sovereign” because most sovereign listings will also use the word “gold”.  In fact, only 650 listings used “sovereign”, but didn’t use “gold”, so by including “sovereign” when we’ve already used “gold” we only reduce the list by 650.  “Sovereign” is 10 characters, so at 6.5 items/character, “sovereign” is a very inefficient exclusion term.

 

Once you are happy with your query, save it.  I tend to save it in a text file, because eBay’s query management is not very intuitive.   The last time I did this exercise, in January, it was all about getting rid of Beatrix Potter, now it’s all about eliminating pound coins from the list, so I refresh my query three or four times a year, as trends change. 

 

 

 

My 300 characters removes more than half of the items in the British Coins category, about 100,000 listings.  That’s more than 300 per character, but it has taken many years to get it refined to that level of efficiency!

 

 

 

Stage 2:  Seller exclusion.

 

Anyone who spends any time watching eBay will already know the sellers that they tend to skip through, and there is a facility to remove those sellers from your query, in addition to the exclusions settled on in Stage 1.  Scroll down the left-hand side of the listings page, and you’ll see “More Refinements”.  A tab in that section is marked Seller, and in that tab, there is an exclusion box.  Select “Only show items from”, then “Specific sellers”, then choose “Exclude” from the drop-down.  The text box to the right is intended to contain a comma-separated list of sellers to exclude.

 

However, there is a bit of sloppy eBay programming in this form that needs a little workaround.  You cannot add seller names to this list one at a time without breaking the query before long – it adds spurious commas and spaces all over the place and the database just can’t handle that, so I keep my “eBay blacklist” in a trusty text file, using the syntax:

 

 

 

Seller1,seller2,seller3

 

 

 

No spaces, a single comma between names, and no carriage returns.  There’s 100 odd sellers on my list, but I’ve been building it for a while.  To update the seller list, update it in the text file first, then copy and paste the entire list into that little text box in eBay, in one hit.  Editing the contents of eBay's text box directly never ends well…

 

My seller list removes a further 40,000 items.

 

 

 

Finally, Stage 3, removing items that are too expensive.  This bit is easy, there’s a little box on the left-hand side that for once, is quite self-explanatory.  I change this every time I run the query, depending on my budget that day, and it usually reduces the list by a further 20,000 items or so.

 

 

 

If you made it to the end, congratulations, and I hope that’s helpful!

 

[Old Time Dealers-Reminising]

Just now, The Coin Cabinet said:

Thanks for that Peckris 2, I'll take a look.

Terry

This is the Edinburgh to Kings Cross journey - over 4 hours long!

 

[Old Time Dealers-Reminising]

 There's a train simulator series on You Tube - very realistic! - which clearly demonstrates that train drivers regulate their trains according to minute detail every few hundred yards or even less. A driver that is doing even 1mph over the limit would be reported if he/she hadn't braked enough in time. It's quite enlightening!!

[Recently acquired 1937 Crown.]

On 1 June 2019 at 1:24 PM, JLS said:

I think there was some circulation of Wreath crowns. Hard to believe that all the VFish examples were pocket pieces. In the end the idea was to give them as Christmas gifts, and they had a fair bit of spending power. Same with the 1935 Rocking Horse crowns, which turn up pretty low grade occasionally. 

"Circulation" includes being kept in the compartment of a purse, wallet, or even clothing. If owned by a non-regular collector it could have worn by frequent taking out, showing off, or even rubbing. The gradual wear might have taken a long time to be noticed by such a neophyte. It's telling that such worn specimens are pretty rare, so their being accepted by traders rather comes into question, especially if only a few score "circulated" in the normal way.

[Ebay's Worst Offerings]

On 2 June 2019 at 9:49 PM, 1949threepence said:

That sounds interesting and useful.

 

I did store it somewhere - if I can find it (might be a long job!) I'll post it.

[Recently acquired 1937 Crown.]

9 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

Looked this up, as I thought the same as you Chris. I've certainly never seen one in circulation (as a 25p piece, as it were). Also called my parents who confirmed they never had - period. Halfcrowns, yes, abundantly, but not crowns.

In any case, surely if they'd been intended for circulation, more would have been minted, and in many more years than was actually the case.   

Although whilst looking this up, it did surprise me that banks are no longer accepting them at face value - link to story

That's outrageous. Even though I say they were NOT for circulation, they are legal tender, so it's possibly unlawful for banks and the RM not to change them for other currency.

6 hours ago, VickySilver said:

Ah, thanks. Well, perhaps I do get a bit technical but will stand on my point. It changes not one whit by what ended up happening with coins that were struck as currency, and were NOT of specimen or proof status, not having been prepped or struck to that standard. They were intended as being struck for circulation and were struck and handled to that standard. To diverge slightly, then such a coin as the CURRENCY 1952 half crown is exactly that - it was prepared and struck as a circulating coin even if it really never did, except for possibly a couple of exchanges of the only specimen known. But back to the crowns: I have no doubt that most of the coins struck as currency type and NOT designated as commemoratives (but struck for the reasons already cited) were saved as momentos and so may have psychologically been kept as commemoratives of the event.

So, to rephrase my carefully constructed discussion:  the coins I cited WERE struck for circulation and were "currency" pieces. Whether or not they were actually spent or circulated is another point, and I NEVER suggested that they widely circulated. I do recall a Churchill commem or two being spent, and even in the case of the Wreath crowns with rather limited mintages we see any number of extant specimens that have wear that is not consistent with "pocket pieces" (although I have seen some of those as well). 

To repeat also, the coins cited were not commemoratives by strict definition and so please reread what I have said.

 

So certainly not a huge issue, but in my opinion we might as well be correct in what we say or how we refer to these coins.

I think we may be using the words 'circulation' and 'currency' in different ways? It seems possible to me that you mean a coin that's neither a proof, specimen, or pattern would come under those headings? Whereas I mean that a coin that was not struck / issued to be spent by Joe Public in shops or other transactions (i.e. not part of the money supply), is neither 'for circulation' or 'currency'. By my usage, Wreath crowns (for example) were not under any circumstances struck for circulation or the mintages would have been significant, and we have it on record (somewhere) both that the Treasury abandoned crowns as an everyday denomination in the early century, and that wreath crowns were only issued in very small quantities to collectors and their ilk.

The 1952 halfcorwn is a very interesting case. It is EITHER a pattern (only one ever having been struck) OR is the sole survivor from the beginning of a currency strike of 1952 halfcrowns, the rest of which were melted down when the King died. In which case - and given that the unique specimen DID circulate - it could be regarded as a circulation coin. It's certainly true that if the King hadn't died, 1952 halfcrowns would have been issued. In any case, it's not a crown!!

I'm not sure what you mean by 'strict definition'? I'd still claim that a 'first year of reign' is a commemoration. What else would you call it?

[Ebay's Worst Offerings]

4 minutes ago, Michael-Roo said:

Absolutely Peter, her and all the others.

I remember how, 10-15 years ago, I would spend and enjoyable hour or two hunting for coins on ebay several times each week.. It was fun, and there were always one or two proper rarities to be found which a seller may not have been aware of when listing. Now, there's so much repro being sold as genuine, washers being described as 'high grade', worthless 1971 pennies on at hundreds or thousands, that I can't even be bothered to look anymore.

Declan Magee created a customised filter to exclude all the dross from searches, which presumably could be adapted for anyone's own use?

[Recently acquired 1937 Crown.]

9 hours ago, VickySilver said:

Incidentally, crowns WERE struck for circulation, this being the intended purpose for 1902, 1928-1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1951, 1953, 1960, 1965 in the predecimal series.

This is getting into the realm of unwanted argument! I already said the 1902 question is open though it raises the question of why no other Ed7 crowns were issued. Wreaths were clearly NOT issued for circulation, as can be seen from the extremely low mintages; my understanding is they were issued for collectors or those who liked the design, and may have been sold via ballot? (Or perhaps that was just the precious metal proofs). 1951, 1960, and 1965 we agree were commems, though the numbers of 1965 crowns was so high (public demand?) that it could be argued they were also for circulation though I never ever saw one in change, or anyone offering one as payment. 1937 and 1953 were 'first year of reign' which by definition is a commemoration. 

In all my time as a collector, I have never seen a single crown of any date in circulation as currency. Never.

[Penny Acquisition of the week]

9 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

Well after a protracted search, I've finally managed to locate and buy a 1918H with probably slightly better detail than most. At any rate, I think it's the best one I'm going to manage.

The breastplate isn't fully struck up, but is not absent either, and there is some reasonable hair detail, which give the King's bald appearance on most 1918H pennies is a bit of an improvement.

Believe me - finding a fully struck breastplate is very uncommon (except on the recessed ear varieties)! That's as good as it gets with a decent obverse. Lovely penny.  

[Victoria 200 SOTD sovereign]

9 hours ago, damian1986 said:

I'd wait for the next issue coming out in the next financial quarter Struck on the day - 200 years since Victoria started to teethe and next year they're doing a struck on the day celebrating 100 years since the birth of Buster Merryfield. 

Also, don't forget that 2019 is the 20th anniversary of Chris Perkins' coin website - the Royal Mint should commemorate that as it's definitely more of an anniversary than the rubbish excuses they come up with to make money!

[Your Indulgance Please Another Dilemma.]

On 28 May 2019 at 10:14 AM, Sword said:

What would be your interpretation then? I can't think of another meaning for "faulty striking" apart from "exceptionally weak strike for the series".

Yes, I would class 'faulty striking' as for an individual coin. However, weak strikes especially due to worn dies are quite common (some denomination years are known for it, see above) so I personally wouldn't class 'weak' the same as 'faulty' but YMMV.

[Recently acquired 1937 Crown.]

On 27 May 2019 at 11:53 PM, VickySilver said:

Okay, funny. These were issued to circulation, and am trying to figure out the commemoration? None is expressed and was simply the first year of reign, not so indicated that I can see. Other than mild abrasion, it is actually quite nice. I don't see major rim issues and the "ding" at 8 o'clock on the obverse on blowup looks to be ??plastic or some such on the coin.

Yes, commemorative as in "first year of reign". Crowns were not produced for general currency purposes after 1901 (some might argue for the 1902) and were either issued as specimen proofs (1927), in response to 'coinie enthusiasm' (wreaths), commemorating a jubilee (1935) or special event (1951, 1960, 1965), or commemorating the first year of a reign (1937, 1953).

14 hours ago, copper123 said:

Does not mean they were not produced alongside other currency issues .

Sorry, I don't understand your point? 

[Is the given letter or number to a gap or a tooth?]

I think the position of the 5 is significant. But not the tail of the 9 which can be affected by die wear.

[Your Indulgance Please Another Dilemma.]

On 26 May 2019 at 3:41 PM, Sword said:

I don’t think it matters very much as the grade alone is insufficient description of the coin. So I think GEF, no wear, weak strike means the same thing as UNC, weak strike. It might even be beneficial for a dealer to use the former as it gives an impression of a stricter standard.

Agreed

As has been pointed out previously, the Spink definition of “fine” is “a coin that exhibits considerable wear on the raised surfaces of the design, either through circulation, or damage perhaps due to faulty striking.” Hence, I assume that some would give a lower grade for a coin that is particularly weak strike. 

You'd have to ask them,but my interpretation is that "faulty" is not the same as "weak".

 

[1858 Penny - large vs small date]

12 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

There are (seemingly) endless variations in the pre 1860 Victoria pennies. 

True enough - but the number for 1858 seems to dwarf any other date.

[Recently acquired 1937 Crown.]

18 hours ago, VickySilver said:

That looks to be a rather exceptional currency piece that probably would have been a good buy at 3x the price 

Sorry to be pedantic, but there weren't any currency 1937 crowns - they were all commemorative.

[Your Indulgance Please Another Dilemma.]

18 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

I was thinking of those George V pennies, typically between 1911 and 1921, which are often weakly struck, with deficiencies in the breastplate and/or KIng's hair. There's a number of BU examples with those poorly struck areas, but also some of often slightly lesser grade with a great strike. Technically the grade is unaffected, but the eye appeal is in the lesser grade fully struck up versions.    

Yes, that's another example where the weaknesses on the reverse are quite normal. I'd say the BU value in Spink is for a normal strike and you could add a premium for fully struck up examples. They're scarce!

 

[1852 Florin - anyone spot any issues?]

Very nice.