Tag Archives: coin collecting

Still Sleeping, Recovering and Repeating . . . and Browsing

Today has mainly featured me sleeping, recovering and repeating, as mentioned in the previous post. It hasn’t, unfortunately seen me doing much in the way of work. When the doctor suggested another week off I was happy as I was feeling quite ill at the time. I also thought I may get some time for writing. Unfortunately this hasn’t happened as I am still quite out of it. This is what I’ve discovered before – healing takes longer these days.

Tomorrow I will try a little harder. Julia is off tomorrow, so although she will find lots to do, I will be able to spend at least an hour or so with her, probably more if I act in a pathetically needy manner. The doctor did say that she would rely on boredom and daytime TV to drive me back to work and I can feel it happening. Even if it does turn into a discussion of my shortcoming and my need for exercise (we don’t see eye to eye on that at all) it will still be better than sleeping in front of antiques and makeover programmes.

Where, I ask, have all the decent quiz shows gone?

I found a really interesting internet site earlier on. It seems to be South African in origin (it features the letters “za” which I always take to indicate Zuid Afrika) but I won’t hold that against it. I still haven’t got rid of all the junk I picked up when using a South African family history site so I am always a little suspicious. However, it did present me with the snippet of information that some Roman Coins had been found whilst excavating a Japanese Castle.

The link is a different link so you don’t need to worry about the security. They are 4th century coins but the castle thrived from the 12th to 15th Centuries, so they seem to have spent a lot of time travelling. Were they actually used as payment, or did Japan have coin collectors a thousand years ago?

I am distinctly short of suitable photos.

Japanese Quince – Arnot Hill Park

A Few More Coins

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As the header picture show, I can’t always prevent myself using unsuitable camera effects. Sometimes I get bored and that’s what happens. I also did a listing for some Elvis Presley commemorative coins a couple of days ago, and the first draft included text to the effect that the experience had left me all shook up and that even hours later I found it was always on my mind. You’d have to have a wooden heart not to feel some emotion at the sight of all those coins being disfigured by cheap stickers with pictures of Elvis on them. The trouble is that most American coins are quite distinctive, and reasonably well made, so they aren’t improved by adding pictures. Nor is Elvis improved when you see the outline of a Walking Liberty, JFK or George Washington underneath, making strange shadows. Look at them and tell me you don’t think the man behind them is the devil in disguise. They make my pink neon picture look quite artistic.

Can you see what I mean- it covers the coin design and does Elvis no favours.

I’ve decided that no depths of taste are too low for the marketing departments of he coin marketing companies, and this probably applies to executives of Elvis Presley Enterprises too.

The next two are pictures of a Tennessee State Quarter from two different angles – one showing the Elvis picture and one showing the George Washington profile. It’s lightly

State Quarter with Elvis picture

Same coin, different angle.

The saving grace of the Tennessee State Quarter is that it does feature musical heritage on the reverse, celebrating the sate’s many links to music, which include Elvis.

Reverse of the Tennessee State Quarter

And finally, an example of what happens if you apply a grey filter to a neon pink coin. Things are not always as bad as they seem.

George II, but this time in grey.

A More Positive Post

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I loaded yesterday’s post has been downloaded. It was touch and go, and I made it with less than ten minutes to spare. WordPress and my computer, appeared to become slower and more glitch-ridden as the deadline approached.

The last sixteen hours of the day were frustrating and unproductive and I’m afraid it showed in my post, and the two attempted posts which I discarded. There is a positive to be taken from that – I managed over twelve hundred words today, even if I did throw half of them away.

Julia has just read the post and commented that I appear grumpy. It’s probably a good thing she didn’t see the deleted drafts.

Cat Stamp

Whilst browsing the site I wandered into Waking up on the Wrong Side of 50. The subject for the last couple of days has been judging. Do we do it? Should we do it? Why do we do it? I do like a good

I do. And the reason I do it is because there are idiots about who need judging. Some of them actually need removing from the gene pool, but eugenics are out of fashion at the moment.

It would, I suppose be nice to live in a world where people weren’t judgemental. It would, of course, be particularly nice for idiots, who could do what they liked without fear that anyone would correct them.

Eugenics will, I’m sure, come back into fashion once doctors work out how to improve the children of rich people with expensive DNA modifications.

However, they should remember Kipling’s Arithmetic on the Frontier. when the revolution starts – ‘the odds are on the cheaper man’. Kipling might be derided for being old-fashioned and jingoistic but he’s often right in what he says, and he has a good turn of phrase.

Bear lurking in woodpile

In my visions of dystopian futures I’m not sure whether I see the downtrodden masses rising up or the robots taking over. They are both fairly dispiriting, but it’s probably most likely that we will just carry on as normal with the rich becoming richer and the poor becoming poorer.

The rich will live in air-conditioned bubbles and be attended by robot butlers while the rest of us wilt in the heat and pin our hopes on lottery wins and making it big on reality TV – bread and circuses as they say.

I have managed to make some progress today, despite being at work in a well-filled day. It’s amazing, but it’s living proof of the old saying – if you want something doing ask a busy man.

We had a man in the shop today who brought his children, It seems he used to buy coins from us 20 years ago. Having recently found his coin collection he showed it to his kids and they have become interested in coin collecting, so he came to buy them some coins. It’s good to see the passing of time summed up like this and it was good to see a father spending time with his kids. They will reap benefits in the future, both the time spent together and the time spent learning about the coins they collect. In the case of my kids it was mainly bird watching and rugby, but the principles are the same.

Sunset over Sherwood

The images are random shots of things that make me smile. I hope they have the same effect on you.

A Look at the Coin Business

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This is a £20 coin from Gibraltar. The £20 is an unusual denomination which some countries, including the UK, have started using for commemorative coins. You can’t spend it, because nobody will accept it, but they can charge quite a high price for it because of the face value. The silver is worth about £6 and the collectable value is not great in most cases.

It is, in short, a bit of a rip-off.

Don’t be fooled about the legal tender aspect, when you look into it the definition of legal tender is very tightly drawn. It appears that legal tender can be used to pay court costs and fines, but nothing else. Nobody else needs to accept it, even if it is legal tender.

This basically means that the Royal Mint can make coins which don’t have to be taken back. We encountered this problem recently when we tried to pay some £5 coins in at the bank. They informed us that they no longer take them. Normally we pay £5 for a UK coin and most of them go straight to the bank as nobody collects them. We can’t do that now, so we can’t pay £5. People, quite rightly, don’t like that. We now tell them to try their bank or post office to see if they are still taking them.

The same is true for £20 and £100 coins, though as far as we know, no bank or post office will take them. We actually sell £100 coins for less than face value at times. It’s a ridiculous side effect of the modern coin trade. Read this article for an insight into what goes on, but before you do, may I just add to the information they provide. If you sell a £100 coin on eBay for £130 as they say, you will pay eBay and PayPal approximately 15% of the cost in fees, so the £130 immediately falls to £115.

Buy coins because they are beautiful, historical, interesting or educational. Or buy them as a present for future generations. If you want an investment ask a bank manager about it, not a numismatist.

This is the reverse of the Gibraltar coin, which is a lovely design. It commemorates the efforts of the Merchant Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Gibraltar £20 Coin 2016

Here’s the best value £100 coin on eBay with a Buy it Now offer of £69.99. I just checked all the ones that sold over the last month. There were 12 sold. One made £140. The other eleven all made less than face value.

There is something called seigniorage, which I don’t understand completely. It’s a branch of Economics, which is also something I struggle to grasp. Basically, if it costs the US Mint five cents to produce a quarter they make twenty cents every time someone puts a quarter in their collection. If you produce collectable quarters, such as the State Quarters Series, this can add up. In fact, it adds up to $3 billion. The USA is the best at this, but the Royal Mint is making a big effort to get a piece of the action.

Tomorrow I am planning two more posts, one of which will be to tell you more about this Gibraltar £20 coin. It is very interesting.

A Typical Day in the Shop

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I thought of taking some pictures to illustrate what I did at work today. It consisted mainly of buying and sorting coins (three times), turning down two lots of cigarette cards (there’s no market for them), helping a burglary victim with an insurance claim and explaining to someone why creasing a bank note heavily makes it unsaleable. As you can probably imagine, I wasn’t able to do much in the way of interesting photography.

We also had the normal calls from people trying to sell us “rare” coins from their change. It’s nice that people are interested in coin collecting again, but it does take time and tact to deal with the enquiries, particularly when they quote ebay as if it’s holy writ.

£2 coin commemorating the Great Fire of London

Commemorative £2 coin

Ebay, as I may have mentioned before, is a guide to what idiots do when they have ten minutes to waste.

You can currently buy a Kew Gardens commemorative 50p for £149.99 on ebay. Or you can come down to the shop and buy one off us for £80, though we’ve had it several weeks now and it hasn’t sold. Or you can get a sense of proportion and buy a nice historical coin.

For that sort of money you can buy a nice silver denarius of Emperor Commodus (177 – 192), a sixpence of Charles I or a very clean George III sixpence of 1818. So much history…

(I have no link to this shop – I don’t even know the dealer, but it’s a good site for finding examples.)

Or you can buy an eight-year-old 50p piece, which may go out of fashion next year.

After fulminating on the state of coin collecting I polished the counters and cleaned the calculator.

Shakespeare £2 coin – history

Shakespeare £2 coin – tragedy

Shakespeare £2 coin – comedy

They are all the same size, despite the way they appear in the photographs – something I need to address.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the fact that people are interested in coin collecting again, and that they can find collectable coins in their change once more (like I used to do in the pre-decimal days of my youth). However, I don’t like the way the Royal Mint markets coins these days and I don’t like all the hype surrounding modern coins.

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Life after the Care Farm