Peckris

Gosh! You have to admire how they've got the coin to match the holographic label on the slab! Been removed!I'm still seeing it! Me too. The seller obviously belongs to the "If You've Already Put Up A Picture Of The Slab, Put Up Another Upside-down" school of eBayers.

I think the problems arise when it's a specialist field with little general encyclopedic source material - which is certainly true of coins: while positively bursting at the seams with tomes on this or that area of numismatics, it lacks a decent general reference source. The Wikipedia editors are therefore a bit stuffed when leaning on contributors for citations, if there aren't any readily to hand. Rob, is this the brockage mistake? "In coin collecting, brockage refers to a type of error coin in which one side of the coin has both the normal image and a mirror image of the opposite side impressed upon it." That is a really stupid mistake - how can one side of the coin feature both conditions? And what's on the other side? You are free to edit that yourself Rob, or I could. (Edited: in fact, I just did!) Yes, but isnt that true of Predecimal.com too. Who would guess that that had anything to do with lsd. That's a good point, though marginally less generic.

Yes, good comparison. I've changed my mind now - it definitely looks suspect.

Go for it Scott! I don't agree that Wikipedia is rubbish at all! Anyone know of a better (free) on-line encyclopedia? It has some errors yes, but much of what we thought was true 10 years ago is now incorrect. My feelings exactly. It's very difficult indeed to get errors past the Wikipedia editors as they require everything to be "cited" and will flag up all instances where "citation needed". It seems a lot more stringent than your average published 'pedia.

Only £30 markup on a £20 item - a veritable bargain - not. I wonder if they would take a George Best Fiver for it? I can outbid you - a Basil Fawlty tenner

The trouble is, it's too generic. It says nothing about the owner's name and/or business or what particular aspect of coins the website is about. IMO it would be like someone specialising (either as collector or dealer) in vintage BMWs, having a domain name of "automobiles.com". It would be good for a general educational site about coins, their history, etc .. if Wikipedia didn't already exist

I'm not so sure? It could equally be a circulated specimen that's later been cleaned. Also, the photo doesn't inspire confidence - there appears (as so often) to be a colour cast. It could also be a 'touch piece' that's been carried around in a wallet - which would explain the knocks and wear - and occasionally taken out and rubbed - which would explain the cleaned look. I think a modern forgery would do a much better job than that.

LOL - you didn't read, VS!! That halfcrown is a proof, and one of the finest coins I own! Remember that 1911 proof florin of Dave's you all cooed over a while back? Well, it's the equal of that, if not even better. Just a pity that a scan can't show its true beauty.

If it's a stinker of an AT specimen, then it's not a "must have" for me, by definition. I do have ugly pieces in my collection, but only because either 1) I got them long long ago or 2) they were so cheap I couldn't resist. AFAIK, I don't have any obvious AT examples.

Doesn't do anything for me I afraid Rob. Just looks like a battered 5 to me. Same here.

On a more serious note though, does he really need 6 images to show off a corroded 2p? Little wonder he started it at $6.99 as his fees for the extra images must come to nearly that. I notice the postage costs are even higher than that. I assume that's because he has to send such a valuable piece by the American version of Special Delivery? Like this? http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?start=150&hl=en&biw=1920&bih=914&tbm=isch&tbnid=t9I0sS7kfPvQfM:&imgrefurl=http://www.raleighscrapmetalrecycling.com/&docid=dc4iAls5kkKftM&imgurl=http://www.raleighscrapmetalrecycling.com/images/slider/slide-5.jpg&w=964&h=340&ei=zDNoUs_LAcTX0QW_ioGwCA&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:53,s:100,i:163&iact=rc&page=5&tbnh=133&tbnw=348&ndsp=39&tx=164&ty=92

On a more serious note though, does he really need 6 images to show off a corroded 2p? Little wonder he started it at $6.99 as his fees for the extra images must come to nearly that. I notice the postage costs are even higher than that. I assume that's because he has to send such a valuable piece by the American version of Special Delivery?

I asked eBay to check the IP addresses of the five members. I woke up to the listing gone. Some form of natural order is restored. Well done, good move.

The nearest I have is this Arcadia siliqua (sorry about the tiny size, it's the best I can do without rescanning) :

If we're onto copper and bronze...

Is she well toned?? From what he tells us, the Misses Peter might be worth a look too, all togged up in their Friday night best. So that's artifically toned then?

1911 proof halfcrown :

Is she well toned?? From what he tells us, the Misses Peter might be worth a look too, all togged up in their Friday night best.

Access will of course allow you to embed pictures, but with a decent size collection the file size will grow to excessive proportions. The way I do it is to have two "tables" (databases), one containing all the coin details, the other just containing the pictures plus a unique identifier that occurs on both databases and links each coin with its picture(s). Then I have picture fields defined on the non-picture database, and by relational magic FileMaker pulls in the pictures from the other database. That way the main coins database remains a slim & trim size, fast to open and use, but all the pictures are there when I want to see them, without having to open the other file.

It's a bit similar to Paulus' offering, but most of my best NT coins are scans, and as you know, scans do for toning what Cameron does for the welfare state...

Can't help it, although it does get my heckles up big time. I was just reading some Coin News articles about toning and AT from a few years ago, and they stress that one of the main motivations behind AT (apart from inflating the price) is to hide imperfections ... something to bear in mind! The toning IMO is an imperfection. AT yes, totally agree, the articles I was reading suggest that an artificial toner is no different to a forger. I am a fan of attractive (to my eyes) natural toning, makes a change from a collection full of bright BUs alone! I don't regard NT as an imperfection per se, do you Peter?Me neither. Mind you, there's pretty NT and there's downright ugly NT too!

Excellent!

Ah, but are they Type 1 or Type 2? Is the P of POTTER to a tooth or a space, that's what I'd like to know Couldn't agree more Peck, definitely not my cup of tea! One of my many criteria for what I keep or sell is 'do I enjoy owning/looking/holding it, does it have eye appeal and a sense of history for me?' That one to me is utterly ridiculous, it's not even as if you could use the weight to authenticate it with any certainty!! I entirely agree, but...... if you are a completist with a relatively modest budget, how are you going to fill the 1839 gap? To buy a decent quality one is going to run into many thousands and that's out of many people's reach, so a grotty one like this may be the only way to fill up the nagging hole. Of course, this is a good argument against being a completist at all, but some of us can't help that. For me it goes back to the days of collecting Brooke Bond tea cards and sticking them in an album. Albums had to be completed at all costs and so the completist is born! Well, ok, but I'd have to be a pretty wealthy completist, or else keep my wife in the attic, if I had £670 to blow on a very very grotty specimen of the numismatic art (that may or may not be genuine...)

Um. So rainbows are now White Yellow Orange Red Purple Blue Green? Whatever happened to the Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain spectrum that I learned at school? Oh that's right - it got Americanised...