1949threepence

Beauty - that's a hard date, especially in high grade.

Some interesting perspectives on the bronze coinage of Queen Victoria from 1860 to 1894, written in 1907 by Fleet Surgeon A E Weightman, RN. Although why he refers to Leonard Charles Wyon as Leonard Courtney Wyon, I've no idea - mistake, or did he know something we don't? link to pages

Thanks, that's a much better view and under magnification it's clearly obverse 9. Not bidding as I already have a decent F97 (and 96 for that matter). But I was just intrigued.

Copied and pasted that into the e bay search bar, but it didn't find it unfortunately. Thanks anyway. Never mind, I'll go with the majority view of Obverse 9.

Thanks chaps. I was poring over it off and on for several hours and switching between the two. Unfortunately there's no blow up facility with this one, so you can't get to see it really close up. I thought the same as you, Jon, but not sure. To be fair, it's a nice coin eitherway. Great toning.

What do you reckon, obverse 8 or 9?

If anybody has any of the following to spare, I'd be very grateful. Thanks in advance:- 1967: February, March, April, May, June, September 1968: March, May, September 1970: February, April.

Meant to post this a few days ago. It's my F160 now freed from its MS64 slab, photographed and suitably cropped. It's much the scarcer of the two 1905 types and I've been trying to get a decent one for some time.

Might be worth reporting to e bay. Problem is, no-one there would know the difference.

That makes very plausible sense.

I'd bet the cases were routinely broken open to spend the lot, scarce penny included. Would have been to big a temptation to resist, especially for kids, or if you were a bit hard up.

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.