1949threepence

But presumably the one's you did find were from far less than £487.50's worth, which is what that stack of 117,000 pennies amounted to?

Did you ever get a 1953 in your change or a bank bag, Chris? I seem to remember once reading that there were a few knocking about in circulation at that time, and whilst very scarce, were not impossibly difficult to locate if you looked hard enough. That's why I was quite surprised that in the survey of 117,000 I mentioned, only one 1953 turned up.

Well I'm sad they've folded, but I have to say that in possibly 6 or 7 years of trying, I never once found details of forthcoming auction lots. Their website was an utter mystery to me.

Quite apart from the trident dot, Pete, that coin has a superb reverse strike.

OK, thanks Pete. That makes sense. I'm 99% certain the package hadn't been opened, but all the postage costs and details shown, were from the USA end. Absolutely nothing from Border Force/Royal Mail that I could see. I think they should be a bit more transparent with their costs.

Got no further e mail as promised by Royal Mail, but as the item was shown in USPS as held at a facility here in the UK, twice removed from Heathrow, I decided to click the tracking details on the e mail link shown in my first post, where I found out the customs duty was £15.42, which was less than 20%, but more than 5% - so, no idea how it was calculated as there was no breakdown of the cost. Tried to pay over the RM website, but it failed to work. Anyway there was a card pushed through the door when I got back from work last night, saying the item was being held at the local post office. So I decided to pick up in person and paid cash. I would have asked the girl at the counter how it was calculated, but the pick up point is at the back of the post office, it's all open and it was pissing down with rain, so left it. Well worth the hassle as it's a really nice coin, but that customs duty is a bit of a mystery. Apologies for rambling on.

Question is: can you fix the problem?

Here is the letter in full from the January 1970 edition, a copy of which I'm now the proud owner. Just need February and April for a full 1970 set now:- Colin Cooke alright.

Agreed - Spink archive is a complete mystery to me. Never found a thing on it yet. ETA: just searched for an auction, found it in the list and clicked on it. Got this:- Not Found (#404) We couldn't find what you were looking for "New and improved" apparently......

"Seller's privacy" just sounds like a fob off to me. Any auction house worth its salt would have sought provenance from the moment the vendor offered the item up. If it wasn't forthcoming, to then state "no provenance" against the sword at auction. Buyers are always going to be interested in the history of any object (where was it found, how long have you had it, where did you get it from etc) So to not bother, with something of that alleged age, is pretty bad form.

That explains why there's no Coin Monthly magazines for that later era, currently on offer. Very few were bought. Pretty obvious when you think about it. Irrespective of price, sales must have been dropping like a stone anyway, for them to abruptly cease publication. Hence the lack of availability now.

Sounds as though something occurred - probably connected with cashflow - which caused them to make the decision to cease abruptly. The fact it was so sudden, with no fanfare (for want of a better word) is probably why it's been so difficult to find out. Last editions flagged up as such, would have been more widely kept and hence available now. Probably regular readers would have thought at first that the shop they used had run out of stock. Unless they had it on mail order. At least we now know.

It was !!! I've got it from the Fitzwilliam Museum website of coin periodicals - link here If you scroll down alphabetically to Coin Monthly, or just go to pages 38 to 39, you can see that the last Coin Monthly magazine was indeed, February 1992. Mystery solved. Of course, what we don't know is precisely what caused them to suddenly fold. I'm assuming that there's no clue in that February 1992 edition, Dave?

I'll keep looking. I have actually seen a 1994 Coin News yearbook on offer, but no Coin Monthly beyond the 1992. So whether there was any overlap or not, who knows. If Coin Monthly did indeed cease at some point in 1992, then I would have thought it unlikely there would have been any more annuals from them. Unless it was much later in the year.

Same here. I could barely afford it anyway after spending £1400 on the F8 from LCA recently. Plus I've got other buying commitments coming up, so it would have been very tight. But it certainly would be good to have one.

Managed to get hold of a copy of the Coin Yearbook for 1992 - presumably the last one produced by Coin Monthly. Probably printed about September 1991 and from reading it, absolutely no clue they were in any difficulty.

Absolutely Pete. I think it may well be something to do with that, as I've had coins sent the same way from the USA marked as "gift" or "token". The seller's way of trying to make it a bit easier for the buyer. There's a certain irony in having to pay customs duty on an item which was originally produced here in the UK.

Actually it was £111,000 with commission £133,000.

£1100 hammer.......

Amazing, and something like £133k with juice added. I should be surprised, but somehow, I'm not. I wish I'd gone for the 1922 reverse of 1927. Obviously with more in the game it would have gone for more than it did, but it would still have been a bargain. Never dreamt it would go for such a low price.

Thanks gents. The other point is what rate of VAT would be properly applied. I hear of cases where 20% has been applied, but my understanding is that the legal rate is 5% on coins.

I recently bought a very nice MS64, F160 from an e bay seller in the US. He's sent it by USPS tracked service, which is good. But I've just received an e mail from Royal Mail saying that I'm likely to incur customs charges because of the declared value of the item. The curious thing is that I've bought from the USA a number of times before, by the same method, without ever receiving any such notification. So I'm wondering precisely what gives with this. Does it mean that some sellers are just not declaring the value? I'm not too bothered as it's worth the extra cost, but I am curious as to why these customs charges seem to be so randomly applied.

Well done. Nice buy.

Yes the 1922 with 1927 reverse was an unexpected bargain, as was, arguably the 1863 die no 4 under date at £2K. But wow, £111K for the Edward VIII penny was well above expectations, and there was obviously a bun fight for the 1849 penny.

Yes, that was a bit surprising, as was the apparent much greater number of 1919H specimens. I should have also added that in the main body of the article, the author stated: "Veiled head Victorian pennies were quite common, but the first 36,000 pennies produced none from 1895, although one came to light eventually". That too slightly surprised me.