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JLS

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Posts posted by JLS

  1. Posted

    47 minutes ago, Martinminerva said:

    I think it has actually been doctored to masquerade as such - and not very well at that!

    I don't think so...I think it's just a surface lamination or even a gouge...it's so totally unconvincing it's hard to imagine anyone considering a successful "doctoring" ! The "3" is not even in the right place. 

    But the price is shocking; let's hope it's the vendor bidding against himself (he can do that without scrutiny because it's a private listing sadly). 

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    48 minutes ago, secret santa said:

    Lukasz certainly has got green fingers when it comes to finding rarities.

    He's not that bad actually, he sold a real die letter halfpenny a while back, went for a very reasonable £50 (although only Poor or so) given that some people were a bit overly cautious. I buy a fair bit from him, but you have to ignore the description and just look at the pictures, which are normally clear enough to understand exactly what's on offer.

    It's nice when he beats you to a bulk lot at auction because you know ~ everything will end up on eBay so you get a second chance to snag anything you particularly liked...

    • Like 1

  4. Posted

    6 hours ago, Martinminerva said:

    Not that I would ever contemplate selling it, but what sort of value might it have given on the plus side its rarity, but on the down-side its overall state??

    I'm pretty sure any one of the major auctioneers in London would take it with a reserve at the £200 mark or so. What it would actually sell for is quite another matter; penny rarities are desirable but the market is fickle, and people will be turned off by the patina/reverse corrosion. 

    • Like 1

  5. Posted

    2 hours ago, Rob said:

    They were producing DEI GRATIA obverses for all the silver in 1695. Probably just a case of someone forgetting the denomination they were engraving. A date of 1695 could mean as late as March, in which case you were only 5 months prior to the start of the recoinage. The decision to do this was made in 1695, so were they making dies in advance of the new mints opening as soon as the law was passed? Again, just forgetting what you were making.

    That would make sense of there being so few of them - pretty much any individual die combination for William and Mary or William III copper is extremely rare, and they put much worse dies into service than this. 

  8. Posted

    17 minutes ago, DaveG38 said:

    I wrote an article for Coin News on this type a few years ago. In that, I identified what I thought were the 5 known examples. Yours appears to be the 6th. The date is not in fact 1696, but 1695 - the last digit is an italic 5 not a 6, made difficult to read through corrosion, but is obvious when put alongside a normal 1696 example. If you are interested, I can pm you a copy of the article, which explains in more detail than I can here.

    Please do - would be very interested !

  9. Posted

    1 minute ago, DaveG38 said:

    I paid £650 for mine, about 4 years ago. It was worth it, as it is pretty much VF+ grade, but has some corrosion through being in the ground. Overall, its about the same grade as the original 'Cowley' find.

    Nice ! Here are photographs of my specimen. Maybe Poor + ? 

    Yours is actually dated 1696 right ? I haven't seen the Cowley piece. 

    N78 obv.JPG

    N78 rev.JPG

  12. Posted

    Hello all, 

    Anyone have a copy of the Spink Numismatic Circular, February 2001? 

    I am curious as to what Spink priced the William III GVLIELMVS DEI GRATIA halfpenny at, as I am thinking about selling my own example which is in very similar grade ! 

    As far as I know, the Shuttlewood piece hasn't been on the market since it was sold by Colin Cooke as part of the Nicholson collection: #78 (http://www.colincooke.com/collections/nicholson_part2.html) 

    Thanks !
    JLS

     

  13. Posted

    On 10/16/2020 at 12:47 AM, SRSNUM said:

    I tried to find other images that matched but the RIC519 was closest I could find.

    Below are Images I found online:

    Wildwinds image-RIC 519

     

    RIC_0519.jpg.aa026fc1ca9fab239dad494ed0892c13.jpg

     

    Roman Coin Database image-

     

    659944553_ric519_750.jpg.e02cbc5b6ea0a31463fdfc3479093d6c.jpg

     

     

    It's the same type. Most of these issues haven't had good die studies done on them so there will be variations in location of lettering etc. under the same reference number. Just compare the obverses of the two pieces you've linked to; the C of CAESAR is much closer to Nero's bust on the second one. 

    In the end the dies were hand made so every die pairing arguably represents a variety. 

  14. Posted

    Looks like corrosion from exposure to water or moisture to me. On worn coins there are often good (albeit time consuming) ways to remedy this sort of damage, but on anything uncirculated with original lustre, you would end up with a toned coin at best. 

    Really nice decimal coins ex-circulation (as opposed to out of mint sets) can be quite hard to find. 0

    • Like 2

  15. Posted

    On 10/4/2020 at 1:54 PM, Paddy said:

    I have picked up bucket loads of coins in the last week and am enjoying sorting through them. 

    This one interested me - obviously Tredegar 1812 penny, but very clearly overstruck on a Union Copper Company Birmingham Penny. Is this unusual? I see lots of 18th/19th century tokens, but have not noticed an overstrike before.

     

    Tredegar D 1812 OS 1-horz Red.jpg

    This is usual; it is rarer to see examples struck on virgin flans (you can tell by the edge, different graining). I've owned a couple of overstruck ones but not the virgin flan type, although they do come up occasionally. 

    Yours is a nice example; like most 19th century penny tokens these were very heavily circulated and not terribly well made in the first place, so anything VF or better is scarce. 

  23. Posted

    1 hour ago, 1949threepence said:

    It'll be interesting to see whether or not the demand for 1974 50p's does spread to other years. It obviously won't take long for collectors to cotton on to the fact that the mintage was the same in 1975, and they too were never issued for currency, merely existing as a proof item.  

    50 pence collecting is very new, but I think it's a fashion which will last, so I would expect some of these other sets to get more attention, and it's great for the hobby - I think past waves of coin collecting have sprung out of people being able to find rarities in their change - think of US collecting in the immediate post-war period (when you could get things like 1932 D quarters in your change), or the British market in the 1960s around decimalization.

    Whether it will make the 1970s sets worth £50 each is another matter. I hope not, but then on the other side the wholesale price being around £5 a set at auction is a little silly, especially given the difficulty of finding some of the sets with red lustrous copper - I went through a whole dealer's stock of them recently and found none I wanted to purchase. Probably the value for all of these will settle somewhere in between. 

    • Like 2

  25. Posted

    15 hours ago, 1949threepence said:

    I make it 15 where there was a proof issue but no currency strike - 1971, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995 & 1996.

    Westminster may not be the only ones who hype up the "scarcity". Others will probably get in on the act. 

      

    The reality is that supply of all of these is somewhat "thin", even if they're not scarce in any meaningful sense.

    There may have been 100,000 issued e.g. for 1974 but some of these will have been split up/damaged/ugly toned, and the vast majority of the others will be owned by collectors and other people who bought them close to the release date. The number immediately accessible to the market is going to be in the low thousands, and that's the sort of supply which can be overwhelmed by sudden demand.

    Unlike the Kew Gardens 50 pence pieces, I don't think this is a case of someone stashing these away with an expectation of profit (yet !); there really are enough customers to exhaust demand at least temporarily. 

    • Like 2
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