JLS

Well at least I got one side right ! Back to looking...

Is this a 5+G = F28 ? Before I get too excited...

VF for portrait details, fair enough - but look at the reverse ! I also don't like the bright metal (dipped?) or the way there are so many little scratches at the bottom of the reverse. Hard to say even from the blow-up photos but I think it might have been tooled.

I don't know, have a look through their lot archives of 1679 crowns. They sell a lot, and the grading is punchy. As is that of a lot of dealers online ! Agreed re. Spink prices. Generally I am happy to buy coins of popular series before Anne @ Spink cat. if they really are in the "old school" grade. In particular, £150-200 is not much for a Charles II crown or half-crown with bold, clear legends and the basic portrait details. You would be able to make a healthy profit just by consigning to auction in bulk. Try buying these coins in today's market...even at twice that price level you get few of them.

For what it's worth, I graded the subject coin about VF too - Wayne bought it via me, although it was being sold by someone else - who graded it as VF ! The reverse is sharper than the obverse to be fair, maybe the portrait is only a Fine+ or a "bold Fine". Of course, under the old strict British grading, this coin is only Fine - and if you went back far enough, it would be Fair to Fine, or just Fair to the Victorians. But modern grade-to-market is a lot more generous. Here is a coin DNW graded aVF a couple of years back. It seems similar or worse to Wayne's coin. Also worth noting the obverse die on Wayne's coin is very worn - look at the die break from the portrait to the rim, the extensive signs of die-clashing. Even if the coin was FDC you wouldn't get full portrait detail with these sorts of die states. Having seen the coin in hand, it looks better from the surfaces etc. than it does for surviving detail.

I like the idea of it coming in through the docks. These turn up a surprising amount in Britain, a lot of people crossing the Atlantic for reasons good and bad in the period.

Well, given that eBay tolerates sellers, who only sell fakes, knowingly sell fakes as a business and lie about selling fakes explicitly...there's not much chance of that. I'm not sure all reproductions should be marked as such...fair enough maybe on fake gothic crowns or something, but there are ancient and medieval coins which people have thought to be fake for a long time and then changed their mind on...would be a bit awkward to have stamped something on it ! Better to have a photo-database of fakes which eBay staff could be referred to and use to remove listings of the most common fakes.

Ah, good catch. Tooled I think these are barely collectable. It's not such a rare coin. I bet the HA coin is tooled too, it looks like the die flaw on his breast has been abrasively ground down and polished off. Amazing what people will pay for mediocre coins in slabs. I knew a chap who wanted £2k for a dog of a Cromwell halfcrown in a "VF30" slab...not only was it not VF, it had smoothing in the fields among other problems. I wouldn't have paid a grand; I advised to consign to auction... DNW got him his money though ! https://www.dnw.co.uk/auction-archive/lot-archive/lot.php?lot_uid=393883

Not AEF or delightful...but early obverse die state ! £6.75k is a bit much. I wonder what it would cost at a coin show...

Hello all, Purchased this coin at Morton and Eden the week before last in a bulk lot...I note the obverse reading of HIBE which is unusual - would anyone who has a copy of Bull kindly confirm if published? I like the old ticket but don't know how far back it is from, there seem to be three different hands on it ! Presumably post-1920, as "Francis" I assume refers to G. R. Francis Collection (Glendining, 24 March 1920)...but a long time before Brooker or even Lockett (?). All the best, J

Cheers Cliff...well Hawkins 2a is just North 2205 as far as I can see (from the 1841 edition)...he doesn't include it in the plates though. Maybe Hawkins 1876 is a bit more thorough, but I'm content it's an unpublished die if not in Bull; of course, it would have appeared in Glendening's in 1968, and probably in a lot of sales before that, but I would guess never illustrated.

Good to know you had a good experience with Teutoburger. I personally put high bids into their sales for usual pieces without worrying about having to pay more than the reserve if no-one else bids; I once put €250 on a rare British token and won it at the €45 reserve which allayed any concerns. Not sure I would do the same with a big ticket item though.

Yes, the pre-1990s issues made of bronze, not the contemporary copper-plated steel. I'd quite like to knock a zero off all our prices - it would be fun to actually buy things for pennies again. Not sure if it would cause any real inconvenience, other countries have redenominated a couple of times recently (Turkey I think is the worst offender).

I'm sure it will on some examples...as the decimal coinage becomes older, unless the size of the coins changes again, these denominations will be worn out. There were a lot of old round pound coins in Poor or Fair circulating ten years ago; and if you look at the contents of your wallet regularly, even the late 1990s Maklouf cupronickel can turn up pretty rough. If we keep these smaller denominations I imagine they will continue to circulate for a long while before anyone thinks to remove them from circulation. I've received 19th century base metal coins in change in Switzerland before.

😮 we've had a penny (of some sort, on and off) since Roman Britain !

This is a 2017 £1.00 coin ,being a Recent Metal detector 'find' | eBay going for that 5p profit over face value after postage costs, eBay/PayPal fees...

It's a common coin. The problem is Krause I think, they price at $95 in XF, and $285 (!) in MS. Of course, really choice examples are only around the £100 mark: https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=1945140; for a circulated one £20-30 sounds plenty. Sure, only 38,400 pieces survived from the mintage...but that's actually quite a large number for a Channel Islands coin !

ITALY Vatican 1 Piastre 1675 - Clement X XF Silver RRR | eBay Not that rare - and obviously ex-mount which reduces this to a couple of hundreds of pounds. The seller delights in RRRs and even RRRRs.

Hello and hope you've had a Happy Xmas ! I recently found this thing in a bulk lot of coins off eBay. It looks like a modern fantasy to me, but it's curious. Struck, nearly 15 grams on a 28 mm flan, obverse looks like a die transfer from a 20 cash, the reverse is a triskeles motif as per the coinage of the Isle of Man. Whoever made it has done a very decent job of making it look circulated. I can't find it listed anywhere. Has anyone seen one of these before ? I'm aware of the rare Soho mule Isle of Man/EIC pieces but this is about as far from a Boulton issue as you can get in terms of quality !

There's not much about - not in Quarmby etc. Have a look at the Isle of Man section of the Withers' "Token Book 2" for illustrations of the Douglas bazaar fantasises.

Excellent - so definitely post 1945 then ! I wonder whether it's part of the series of fantasies made for J. Schofield of Rochdale in the 1960s...have been trying to find the copies of the Douglas bazaar tokens without any success, they appear to be rarer than the originals.

I've had several die varieties in this series which Colin Cooke didn't have examples of; I don't think he was greatly interested in the series. There's a prejudice going back all the way to Bramah that these die variations are so numerous that they are not of interest to collectors; of course, if you applied the same thinking to the bun pennies, there would be no Freeman, Gouby etc. The reality is that this series is notoriously underexplored; you can get £50 or £100 for the more interesting die varieties in nice crisp grade, but not many people appear to be after them in circulated condition right now.

Use silver dip, just wash the coin immediately afterwards in cold water; you need to dip for less than a second to achieve desirable results; if you leave the coin in the dip for any appreciable amount of time it becomes very obvious that it has been dipped with the flat surfaces Paddy mentions. Do it outside and wear gloves though because the chemicals (thiourea) are carcinogenic.

Maybe, although I think experienced collectors tend to snipe things on eBay. When there was an 1860 TB/BB mule on eBay last, it went from £250 to £1k in the last 5 seconds if I recall rightly.

If I didn't often buy things from Lucas, I'd be tempted to put £1k on it or something and then just not pay when I won, on the grounds that it is not as described. But I'm afraid I'd probably end up on his blocked bidder list.