augsburger

What you have to remember is, there were three competitions with different rules for the different competitions. Fair, well certainly the person I spoke to who didn't get the gold coin felt it was extremely unfair. I think the mint learned a lot from this. We went and were told when the official announcing date for coins would be. The mint probably just assumed there would be a big fanfare. It came out in like two newspapers, made a little stint on the news, but the reality was that most people didn't really care about it. So the mint has been far more aggressive since with their marketing.

She might not have been given the gold coin. I don't know because I never met her. However there are some who didn't receive gold coins. When we turned up to the Mint, the picture of the swimming coin was underwater. So, I'd presume, his coin is underwater. They decided to change it AFTER that time I believe, or at least hadn't changed it by this time, which was September before the coins came out.

I think they will continue with commermorative 50p, don't know about the £1 whether is will change or not. The other question i have is, will the traditional design of the coins sets change so they show the jigsaw pattern or will they have a disjointed pattern with the circular arrangement, it'll be a pain for them. I think they should have made the area that the coins covered, especially the 20p and 1p a little more of the shield, they have gone for something very uniform, rather than one here and one there in seemingly random places.

Which will go down very well with all those foreigners, maybe they should have a coin identification thing at all airports. I know that foreigners already have problems. I'm just looking forward to being able to call a 20p a lion's arse! "That'll be four lion's arses please"

So what do you think then? The coins are still royal in nature, but kind of go against the traditions, no crowns no britannia. Do you actually care they have changed?

SO the design of the new coins are out, and they were are described, but who would have thought they would look like this??? Looks kind of like a kiddies jigsaw puzzle. Hmm!!!!! I don't think the coins will work too well on their own, but i suppose they are something different that has never really been tried before, as far as i know, but will they be popular? I can't see it, and i can see the whole britannia issue flaring up in the daily mail tomorrow.

I have no idea, but it shouldn't be that hard for someone to take a proclamation and change it, send it to the paper as a joke, you would have thought. Also, why has nothing come out about this anywhere else. I know the royal mint is not the fasted of bodies but westminster collection seems to be much faster in publicising what the mint do, and they have nothing. The Daily mail on line claims the designs will be declared in april, the royal mint said end of spring, which i make may june time.

They exist for euros, though you'd have to get them in the eurozone probably, try looking on ebay, i know they sold them in Kauffmann in Germany and in other places.

I'm going to be very sceptical about these, i put in some designs for the coins and i did a sort of parody of old coins and didn't get past the second round, though i didn't expect to because the designs were supposed to represent the new britian, and those simply do not. We already have roaylist symbols, i can't see them putting stuff through that isn't new and different. Besides i am expecting designs that are much worse than those, even if they are a little repetative. A chav on the 1p, a can of beer on the 2p, britannian getting beaten up on the 50p. Oww, i'm having a negative day today.

The main problem with just sticking to older and usually more expensive coins, is how do you get people interested in coins in the first place. You can see in the eurozone and in the US after the quarters program that many people are taking an interest and getting into coins, they start with the cheaper coins, because you don't want to walk in to a fair, spend 5,000 and find out that it isn't worth anything, better to spend a few quid and find out it's worth 20p. How do you get anyone to buy your coin mag at the beginning of their coin collecting "career"??? Generally if there is enough for everyone then you have yourself a publication. I think coin news doesn't have enough for most people. I think there are two types of modern coins, those for investment such as gold and silver commemoratives which personally i don't like, and then the general circulating coins that are cheap. Of course the ones produced by mints to make money are targeted at coin collectors, but i believe there are a number of people who collect circulating, try and get a set from each country they come across. I got into collecting from travelling and living abroad, i came back from the US with a bunch of coins that i had not intended to collect, went to spain got pesetas and then the euro came out, i put them all together. I can't afford to spend 50 quid on a coin, let alone thousands, i have no secure place to secure these items so there is no point. Maybe some will look down on me as a non-serious collector, i don't know. Generally though i think buying a coin magazine is a little pointless, as most of the info i want i can get off the internet, which may be the death of coin magazines in the future. German magazines though are far more popular than they are here. Their population is only a little bigger, add on prehaps austria of 8 million and swiss germans and you have around 100 million pool for coin collectors, but they have four magazines. If you sell more copies by doing things like modern coins, then you can make you magazine bigger and full of more things about older coins as well.

I have only ever bought a few copies of coin news, i found that some people say that there is not enough about old coins, i find there is not enough about new circulating coins either. I lived in Germany for a while and they have three or four coin magazines (one from austria) one does lots of articles about things and is interested in gold and silver "investments" while one of the others every month had an item about coinage from one country, so you'd get pictures of the current circulating coins with a little history, while also having the new coinage from countries all around the world, mainly commemorative but sometimes circulating. They also have the price guides for all coins, every month, which probably increases the cost a little, though it did cover Austria Germany and Switzerland which was good. I know that stamp and coin magazine does a lot of american coins, but prehaps coin news could focus on say australian, new zealand, american, canadian coins, what is current what was in the past with a little history behind it, make people want to buy every issue rather than flick through in smiths and not buy it. I actually prefer the publicity from that newspaper type bit, rather than the actual magazine.

Olympics coin 2008, if we follow the canadian example, olympic coins possibly 2011 or maybe before as well, hoping only for 2012 though. The Charles coin will just be charles one side, the queen the other, owww, boring. The elizabeth one is okay, but nothing more than that, personally i liked this years one, simple, beautiful etc. This set will have the old coin designs, so the sets can be sold early, and then another set will be sold with thenew coins which again, do not seem to be ready at all and are behind schedule. Or maybe just a way of making more money. There does not seem to be a 14.95 set though, an xmas set http://www.royalmint.com/PackedSets/DU08XSKI.aspx Which has the new 2 pound coin in it though for 16.95 of which 250,000 will be produced when they said that the other set with 1p to 1 pound was somehow special, though it will be 6 pounds for the new 2 pound coin!!!!!!! And for some reason the 5 pound coin of charles can be seen better on picture number 4 even though it is not being sold on this set. And i hope if charles becomes king that protrait will not be used, my god, how much grease did he use on his hair???? I'm confused!!!!!

Apparently if she gets that far she'll be the longest serving monarch of all time, i think she is going to become third later next year. One of the louis is the record holder i think it might be Louis XIV who served from 1643 to 1715 which is 72 years, the queen is at 54 years, so in just over 18 years time, which will make her nearly 100 i believe.

I suppose people have now seen that the Royal Mint is making a set of 1p to 1 pound with the year 2008 on it, and is available now as far as i know. I'm assuming that they are not ready for the new coins, they want something to be given as xmas gifts but the new coins apparently will not be ready in sets until "late spring". I have the feeling that the coin designs will be poor, i entered the competition and did not have much time to produce anything but they wanted something that represented the new britian, full of chavs and all that. Not sure if they are doing the 1 pound coin, it was not part of the design competition but they have decided to issue this in the set coming out. Normally the designs are shown sometime in november to be sold around xmas or afterwards, so a release of the design may not be available till march.