secret santa

Liam Could put the obverse up as well or PM me a photo and I'll add it to the website although they're coming out of the woodwork so fast that it may prove to be not so rare as I thought. Richard

Could well be.

Fancy finding 2 rare English pennies in Bulgaria !!!

I agree.

I have now added this coin to my website - I hope this is OK with you Voynov ?

That's because they are !

Many thanks for the responses to this.

Thanks Rob - who's the baby ? (BM = British Museum ?) Was it issued in 1897 ?

1877 pennies exist in a variety of widths. It's pity that you can't count the teeth on your examples. Gouby's Victoria penny book shows good examples. Here's a wide one.

Well, he did say Freeman 8 closer ribbons above.

I think he means the F77 and 78 varieties with obverse 8. They are both rare in high grades.

Tim, do you mean G reverses, or a different obverse ?

This is the penny that was sold by Heritage last year for £150K - this guy needs reporting !!!

Our friend Lukasz has put an E over P on Ebay but it's a beaded border penny, i.e. unrecorded. Do I smell a rat or is this an exciting new find ? http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Victoria-Penny-1860-E-Over-P-Variety-Very-RARE/332425153468?hash=item4d66154bbc:g:WdsAAOSwT2dZ8E9b

First of all, the coins are poorly presented, apparently in random order. I checked the pennies and they don't seem to be in any sequence, e.g. date, which makes checking them tiresome. Secondly, they have a bog standard F10 covered in verdigris at £200 - totally unrealistic. Frankly, I'm surprised and disappointed.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/VICTORIAN-BRONZE-PENNY-KING-GEORGE-1917-VARIOUS-DATES-AVAILABLE-SEE-BELOW-/382253764824?hash=item59001990d8:g:VYsAAOSwFjlZuOSU Title says it all !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's a photo of an obverse 7 with that colon dot missing. Maybe they added it back in later and there may be obverse 7 coins with a mis-aligned colon ?

Sadly there's no photo in their archive.

Do you what lot number this was Pete ?

here's Laurie Bamford's example.

Can someone please tell me how to produce this overlaid picture ? I can flip the reverse photo in Paint but don't know how to superimpose a rotated picture onto the obverse.

Pete sent me the following picture which nicely illustrates the source of the "crow's foot". It's interesting that, although the crow's foot is always in the same place, it's caused by a clash with another coin's reverse at an angle of around 30 degrees whereas I would have expected the reverse to be vertical.

This particular clash on Victoria's neck occurs quite often on coins from the 1860's and 70's and has been referred to as a "crow's foot". If you search the posts for this you will see several mentions and examples. I have one on an 1877 penny. As Rob says, almost certainly caused by the folds on Britannia's dress.

I actually bought it from Michael Gouby 14 years ago.

The trouble with early bronze coins is that date width differences occur so often that they are too numerous to catalogue and, because the final date numeral was often hand punched onto "blank" dies, the actual die variety does not differ between coins of a particular year and therefore does not, arguably, constitute different coin varieties. Michael Freeman didn't record date width differences within a given die type (with different Freeman numbers) but Michael Gouby did allocate different identifiers for a few "select" years with date width variations in his first book "The British Bronze Penny", e.g. 1889 narrow date, but then went on to record further variations in his follow up book "The British Bronze Penny 1860 to 1901". Collectors often collect these different date width variations but shouldn't really expect them all to be given different reference identities. But arguments as to what constitutes a "variety" will continue ad infinitum.