Hi fellow CT members. I have a Macrinus provincial that is marked as being the Varbanov "plate coin". I do not have copy of Varbanov but saw in another thread that Zumbly has a copy. I reached out to Zumbly to get his opinion. Zumbly was very kind sent me a picture of the Varbanov reference. We agreed that on first glance they look like a match. But, there are a couple of things like a die crack that is unaccounted for in the Varbanov pic. Since replying last to Zumbly I rediscovered that my coin is "the coin" listed in Wildwinds and that in the "text" on Wildwinds it is listed as the plate coin in Varbanov. I also discovered I still have a copy of the dealers photo. I know that just because something is listed in Wildwinds does not make it true. This is not a complaint against Wildwinds; I like respect Wildwinds very much. Just trying to confirm or deny that my coin is or isn't the plate coin. So...I am looking for your opinions. Do you think my coin is the Varbanov plate coin? Here is a whole slew of pics of the coin(s) in question: My pic in color: Here is the Varbanov pic from Zumbly (Thanks again) Here is my B&W pics Here is an edited version of Varbanov pics: Here is the dealer pics (notice that the die crack over the knee is not really showing): Here is the Wildwinds link (not sure if I can use their pics here on CT?) The die crack over the knee does show here: https://www.wildwinds.com/coins/ric/macrinus/t.html What do you think? Plate coin or no?
The dies match but the flan doesn't, unless the Varbanov images were cropped or altered (unlikely?). Sometimes there can be seemingly incompatible differences when it's really just a difference in camera angle but I don't think that's the case here.
I was going to say it's a double die match, but not the plate coin itself, but our illustrious @TIF beat me to it!
Same coin, I'd say. Note the two small pits in exactly the same position before Macrinus' chin. I have noticed that Varbanov quite often retouched his images to remove faults and make the coin look nicer. Another bad practice of his: when he had an image of only the rev. of a particular coin, to add an obverse taken from some other coin, quite often from a different mint, producing die combinations that never actually existed, because he wished all of his illustrations to show both sides of the coin.
If one compares the position of the reverse border of dots, around 7:00, in relation to the edge of the flan, the dots on the plate coin are much closer to the edge. Can't be the same coin.
Per Curtis, Varbanov has been known to edit/alter images. The difference in flan outline could be due to cropping of the plate coin images and because of certain other coin-specific imperfections seen on both images, he concluded they are the same coin.
