Madness

An embarrassed embarrassment. Oh, for the wings of a dove!

?

https://youtu.be/5EcnUmnbyUQ Beautiful song about a collector of a different sort. Big Big Train are a contemporary Brit prog rock outfit. Lineup includes Dave Gregory of XTC.

Great band! That song takes me back to me back to the early eighties. Many reasons for the choice of my user name.

I started to plan a comparative analysis to find as many variations in the 1787 shilling as I could find and work out their combinations to see if I could notice a pattern. Before I got more than toe deep I decided to look into the meaning of the reverse legend. Stumbled across this amazing article. It explains everything! Answers all my questions. From the conclusion: "These coins represent an intermediate stage in the modernization of coinage techniques. The inscriptions on the obverse dies were made with individual letter punches, a centuries-old practice, but the reverse dies were sunk from fully-lettered punches, a major advance. Even on the reverse dies, however, fine features such as stops, the Westphalian horse, the semee of hearts in the Hanoverian arms, and the strings of the Irish harp were added individually, suggesting that truly complete punches (except for the last two date digits) remained difficult to manufacture or impractical to use". This explains the differences I was seeing in the positioning of the inscriptions on the obverse. I also noticed that some examples had a six-stringed harp and others had a seven-stringed harp on the reverse. I can imagine some poor bugger trying to hand-engrave evenly-spaced strings on various die. Not an easy task I would imagine. Boy this hobby goes deep! I could spend a lifetime trying to track down strikings from all the different dies of this coin and a mint finding a Pingo proof. That in itself would be another rabbit hole, collecting a complete set of these 1787 proofs of shilling, sixpence, guinea and half-guinea! I can see much fun awaits me! Please correct me if I misuse jargon.

Does "legend" mean the text on a coin?

Ah - I'm an idiot! They are three separate variants: a. dot/no-hearts; b. no-dot/no-hearts and c. dot/hearts. How many manufacturers of this coin were there? Would this account for the differences? If only one manufacturer, did they mix and match obverse and reverse dies randomly? For example, might one expect to find a coin with the obverse of b (above) and the reverse of (c)? Thanks!

A thought that before learning to spot a fake I'd start to carefully examine the characteristics of the real deal. Found an auction house website and examined images of VF & EF 1787 shillings. Here are images of the obverse of the first three examples I saw: Yep - There are two variants: The dot over the wreath and the dot not over the wreath. However, the position of the text is slightly different between all three. Check out where the last "I" of "III" ends and the "D" of "Dei" begins. Is one of these non-genuine? Were there different dies with different text positions? Similarly, I examined the reverse of each of the coins: The dot between "F" and "D" at the top of the coin in example two is lower than in the other two. Incidentally, this is the non-dot coin. Is this typical of this variant? Furthermore, re text "A.T.ET.E.", there is no evidence of the dot before and after "ET" in the first example. Is this wear? A variant? It's going to be hard to try and spot fakes without knowing everything that's within the range of acknowledged, acceptable variation and their acceptable combinations! I have much learning to do.

Thanks all for your words of welcome! @copper123 "The Standard Guide to Grading British Coins" is next on my to-buy list. Thanks for the suggestion. @PWA 1967 I'm an Australian living about five hours drive away from Brisbane and six hours drive away from Sydney, the two closest capitals. The rural town I live in unfortunately doesn't have any coin fairs. For fun, most people here drink beer, drive utes in a manner-unbecoming-a-gentleman and shoot pigs, often at the same time. @DrLarry Well deduced! BTW - great to be in the company of fellow loonies. I'll certainly be looking into the fake-coin shenanigans. Being in Australia, I don't think eBay and PP users have the same protections as in the UK. Will certainly look into it if the coin happens to be a dud (or duddish). Here's the eBay listing. The coin seems unnaturally shiny. Will have to wait for it to arrive to see what's going on. Will post photos when they arrive. Without a doubt they will be grainy and out of focus. How do you chaps take such cool photos, out of interest?

Looking for a new hobby, wife inherits a half-sovereign and... abracadabra! Here I am. I see coins as tangible, and sometimes beautiful, artifacts that are representative of ages, events and historical figures; Something you can hold in your hand that has passed through the pockets and purses of ordinary people of times past. I've also decided to collect a small number of meaningful coins rather than going for bulk. With this in view, I'm focusing, perhaps unwisely, on Australian proclamation coins. I'm less than a week into numismatics. I foolishly purchased earlier in the week a 1794 guinea. From eBay. From an unknown seller. Without research. Without photos. My monthly budget is about 50 pounds. I spent about 430 pounds on this coins. A bit of retrospective reading revealed that, apparently, "good very fine" doesn't mean what a layman would expect. I'm about to start looking for a 1787 shilling. Here are a few questions: How do I tell the difference between a poor strike and coin wear? I'm aware of some of the pieces of evidence of cleaning/dipping. Is there a comprehensive, illustrated guide somewhere? Do you have a preferred variant of this coin? If so, which and why? Could I get one in extra-fine condition for somewhere in the range of 100-150 pounds? Are there any trustworthy sellers you could recommend? It will take me between two and three months to save, so plenty of time for reading. Thanks! Looking forward to learning from this community of friendly experts.