Red Riley

Just a bag or box or whatever where you throw the coins you aren't immediately interested in.

I agree that it is similar to the tone found on ancient coins and although the surface is stable, nobody is going to buy a coin that colour whereas it might be worth £10 or so with a normal patina. Anyway, here it is; The scan, as usual makes it look far worse than it is. The obverse is far less badly affected.

Among the coins in a bulk lot I acquired at London Coins auction last Sunday was quite a pleasant little 1867 halfpenny in NEF condition. Although it doesn't suffer from verdigris, its tone, although only visible in certain lights is dark green. Has anybody come across this phenomenon before and if so, have you had any luck in converting it to something a little more conventional? If not, it'll have to go in my 3 for £1 box.

Don't know, I'm only a new boy there. If he is, we'll no doubt find out (cue begging letters...)

I hope I'm not revealing any confidences here, but one of the regular members of the Reading coin club was grubbing around in his odds and ends bag (we've all got one) the other day and pulled out a well worn 1863 penny. A quick clean revealed the die number 5 (in the 'H' position). Only the second known apparently...

I mean honestly, what a load of twonk.

Phew! Thank God for that, my head was aching trying to remember all the hammer prices you were asking me for.

Crikey, now you're asking! My recollection was that it went for a bit more than upper estimate but I didn't keep a record. Currently sorting out the 153 coins I bought...

Surely that can be a mixed blessing. Thinking that you had not won the coin, you go on and bid for another lot or several and spend your last penny on them. Then you get the bill for the coin you originally wanted but thought you hadn't won...

Crikey, Derek. Is that your 26ME? Or is it a 27? 'No it's my personal 26 ME' he lied.

If you think any are, post pictures on here and we'll check them for you.

Tumbleweed blowing slowly across the desert...

Your wish is my command. If my computer's not playing silly b*ggers, the second image is the ME. Quality may not be great in order to fit within the size limits. Yes, it's playing silly b*ggers, it told me that was going to be 10 cm. across... You should however be able to download and enlarge if you have the right equipment.

Sometimes it's best not to play Aunt Sally, and although I'm now a forum god, I think the capital on the pronoun is a little excessive.

It seems to be an incontrovertible rule that anybody incoherently selling utter crap has to charge an arm and a leg for the postage.

He is on record as saying that he wants to style himself George VII in honour of his grandfather.

You are probably right here. We know for example that the vast bulk of 1951 pennies went to Bermuda (I think it was Bermuda) and 1950s to Northern Ireland. We only know this because they are entirely separate areas and comparatively easy to isolate what is in circulation. The same must happen to all other coins but because there are no physical boundaries to cross, the whereabouts of issue remains entirely unknown. It must therefore be odds on that all the MEs were released in one area, but at this distance in time it is impossible to tell where this was.

Now, where did I put that trombone...?

I hate predictive texting and refuse to use it after agreeing to meet some friends at 'The Cock Tavern' (OK, bad enough in itself). When I checked what I'd sent I was meeting them at the 'Anal Tavern'! Bizarre.

Dave, the first thing you must do is weigh it (should be c. 14.14g give or take say, 0.1g). If it comes up short send it straight back.

I'm not sure I entirely agree here. Any fool can spot an H or a KN but it takes practice to isolate an ME from the ordinary effigy. Coin collectors are like anybody else and their level of interest and thence skill will vary widely. Only a tiny minority will have had the interest to buy or borrow a publication which shows them what to look out for. My change collecting of pennies as it related to MEs went in three stages; 1) I had no knowledge of there being two varieties of 1926, although I did know about Hs and KNs; 2) I found out that there were two types but initially thought they had a small head like 1928-36. I hadn't picked up on 1927 being a different design; 3) Somebody pointed out to me what I should be looking for and after a while I could recognise one at ten paces. As £400 and 1949 Threepence have pointed out, pre-internet collectors were often lone wolves and it took time to garner information about the subject. Many will have learnt more by borrowing Seaby's (now Spink's) from the library, as I did, but library books have to be returned and you can't learn everything in the two week period before the fines start to kick in. My point is that because of the level of skill involved there were always going to be less people looking out for MEs, although I suspect that like KNs (not Hs) the majority were eventually harvested from circulation but as this took a long time, they were typically in worn condition.

The beading will often give it away. On a circulation coin, the angle of the edge can often be a little rough and contain a minute amount of spare metal whereas the proof will appear to be much better finished in this area.

To give you a little more background here, as I say, my checking through change lasted roughly two and a half years and it was actually quite a large scale opration. With my father running a busy shop, I was able to lean on him to get quite a large number of pennies from the bank - maybe £5 or even more every week, plus whatever came into the shop, so you could maybe estimate that I checked 15-20,000 or more pennies from 1969 to 1971. Not one ME, not one KN and not one penny from the fifties, so it may be that by then most of the interesting coins had already been sucked out of circulation leaving just the dross behind. Or possibly somebody at the bank was pulling the best stuff in their lunch break!

I would have to say that this is over 40 years ago now and my 18-20 is not much more than inspired guesswork. There was a pal of mine who also used to wade through his coins and I know that he never found one either, so perhaps they really were that rare. Fair to say though that a disproportionate number would ultimately have been taken out of circulation by collectors but whether this was significant or not, I just can't say.

The best estimate I have seen (and I have no idea where I got it from) was of about 400,000 ME's. I have to say that although I collected avidly from change for maybe 2 1/2 years, I never saw a 26 ME, but at the same time must have encountered 18-20 1926 ordinary effigies, so read into that what you will. I think it is fair to say that if the only 1926 pennies issued equated to the small number of ME's then they would be far more common in higher grade. People (especially kids) used to put aside an example of each date and for 1926 this was most likely to have been an ordinary effigy. Variety collecting was in its infancy then and most collectors would be either unaware of the variety or just weren't that concerned. Added to this the fact that being produced from new dies which were presumably only brought into use when the old ones were worn out, the ME's were likely to have been issued last and quite conceivably not until 1927 by which time most collectors already had their BU 1926. A fair bit of conjecture there, but it does seem to make sense and give a reasonable explanation of this coin's rarity.