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There are indeed fingerprints and fingerprints. I have a pattern 100 francs in silver from Monaco (1950), graded MS65 by NGC. It has a minor fingerprint on the reverse which doesn't really affect eye appeal; giving it a top grade in a slab seems fair. The bun penny I'm talking about had a subdued finger print on Victoria's face which was clear enough that you could probably use it in a criminal investigation; you had to hold it to the light in order to see the portrait properly at all. I think a coin like that would be better off toned brown than "fully lustrous" with such ugly contact marks. But the grading company didn't care. Regarding the MS65 criteria...all that PCGS says is "Above average strike with minor marks or hairlines, mostly out of focal areas". I think a fingerprint is treated as a minor handling mark...irrespective of the actual effect on the eye appeal of the coin.

"'ole in the wall" as a pub name - love it ! Thanks Mick.

Hi Mike as far as I am aware the coins were pressed into the aluminum surround during manufacture. Although I don't have any firm proof of this. The majority of encased farthings in the UK were produced by J R Gaunt you can tell this by the initials of JRG on the surrounds although some were produced by other manufacturers some of which I have yet to establish so most are unknown. They were made as advertising pieces for the different retailers so would assume they were given out to customers as lucky coin gifts. The most common being Hooper Struve and Chelsea Hotel Jersey these come up quite often. I find them an interesting sideline to my other collections. Recently though I seem to be spending more time researching these and hunting them down. It's very rewarding when I do manage to track one down I haven't found yet. I just wish there were other collectors out there that I could chat to and swap information, it seems there is only a handful of us collecting these. Below is an example I have been after for a while it's from my home Town where I used to live as a teenager and into my early 20s the pub advertised I have actually visited. It's now closed down and is a private house now.

Well done, not my field but a useful addition to the corpus of knowledge. Jerry

Stunning architecture in the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia.