The Sovereign (Help and advice).

I am author of the UK Coin News Magazine series of articles on the Gold Sovereign 'Revival of the Sovereign' based in the UK. I am currently researching a book on the Sovereign and I hope by joining this forum and starting this thread I can answer your questions on Sovereigns and other related UK Gold coins. I hope this will be a 2 way process as I am also looking to gain information as well as give it. I will keep a regular eye on this thread and at some stage will upload my articles to the blog section.

 

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Hi Sovereign welcome to CoinTalk

 

In what order should I buy the coins for my collection?

Hi Clive, Hello everybody,

May I get the ball rolling by asking how—once you’ve decided what you ultimately want to have in your collection—do you decide the order in which you buy the coins? My specific interest comprises sovereigns, of course, but I would welcome the experience of collectors in other areas.

The reason for the question is that I have recently done the sums, and realized that collecting all the sovereigns I would love to have will take me more than 20 years … and I’m already over 60! I need to be more focused. So I have spent some time in review, and have postponed areas I find fascinating—such as post war Australians—in favour of the three targets that mean the most to me:

(1) a complete sovereign date set from 1817 to 1932 (except perhaps 1819); I still need 63 dates, nearly all of which are either

(1a) Victorian shields, or
(1b) Old Kings;

(2) a set of Canadian-struck sovereigns (except perhaps 1908 and 1916)—I have family links with Canada; and

(3) a type set of quintuple sovereigns (except perhaps Una and the Lion)—I’m a sucker for large, pretty, gold coins.

At 3 to 4 ounces of gold a year, even this restricted collection will take me 10 years.

Now should I keep my eye on all of these targets and buy coins as they crop up? Or should I concentrate on each area in turn, finishing one before moving on to another? And, if so, in what order should I tackle the areas?

I suspect that decisions like this have faced many of the collectors on CoinTalk in their different areas of interest. We all find that we have more wishes for coins than we have money!

Later,

John

 

Hello John

It is always a good idea to define your collecting parameters and certainly a date series only, allows you to avoid most of the extremely rare sovereigns as normally (not always) there is a cheaper alternative. Unless you particularly want a separate Canadian collection why not combine this with your date run? For most dates 1908-1919 (No Canadian 1915) the Canadian coin is the most interesting anyway, although I would advise also including 1916 London and 1919 Melbourne. 1920-1931 avoid South African sovereigns and stick to Australian struck coins, you can do this on a reasonable budget Perth and Melbourne will get you there, unless you are looking to add 1923 / 24 SA to your collection the only SA mint you should have is 1932.

1817-1837 is expensive in good grade with 1828 @10k GBP on its own, so I would give this aspect of your collection careful consideration before embarking on and suggest you maybe start at 1838 Victoria? Here you will find a 1838 available mainly in low VF grades for 600-1000GBP without too much trouble, then you can double that for a similar 1839 and double again for a low grade 1841. From 1842 your date run becomes a lot easier and cheaper, for initial collections you should try to find coins in @VF-GVF which are both available if you look for them and relatively inexpensive compared to EF or even UNC. Don't be fooled by fuzzy Internet pictures with the seller proclaiming their coin to be uncirculated, 99 time out of a hundred they are not.

As you work your way through your date run I always advise looking to improve on the dates you already have, if you have a 1862 and you see a better one at a good price buy it and sell the original. This way you will constantly improve your collections overall grade at very little extra cost, so even when you complete the run you still keep looking to improve, its a lifetimes work :mouth:

I hope that is some of some help?

 

John the Jute wrote, "We all find that we have more wishes for coins than we have money!"

Aint that the truth!

 

Sovereign,
Welcome to the forum. To quote GDJMSP's Signature ... Thanks for the knowledge you bring and for sharing it !!


John The Jute,

I chose to collect one sovereign from each country/mint of the King George V Bust design - in MS64/65 grades. This set can be assembled within a very reasonable budget.

I still have Australia (Melborne Mint), Australia (Perth Mint) and Canada (Ottawa Mint) to go to complete my set.

Great Britian (London Mint) 1925


South Africa (Pretoria Mint) 1932 SA


Australia (Sydney Mint) 1918 S


India (Mumbai/Bombay Mint) 1918 I

 

Thank you everyone.

Best wishes, Chip, with finding the money for at least some of your collecting goals, and best wishes, Silver Eagle, with your sovereign type set.

A "World Gold Collector", eh? If assembling a collection of sovereigns is a lifetime's work, a collection of world gold coins must be truly daunting. I have just bought the new edition of the Friedbergs' Gold Coins of the World and had a wonderful time tracing the trade coins--the florin, the ducat, the doubloon, the Napoleon, the sovereign--through the various countries that minted them. Collecting a representative selection of these must be a mammoth undertaking.

Yes, Clive, your comments were of course helpful. I may feel the need, or at least the desire, to have an example of the first ever sovereign, the 1817, soon; but it seems I would do well to postpone collecting the Old Kings, 1818-1837, for a while.

Those suggestions of more recent sovereigns I should collect are also most useful. Thank you again.

John

 

Welcome my Liege to our ever humble abode. I have a taste for the Ole sovereigns myself. Here are a few of mine. :bow: Traci

 

Hi Sovereign,

In the light of the Quartermaster Auction the Aussie dealer concerned, stated his opinion of rarity of the Melbourne Shield series. They were quite at odds with those of Marsh. The dealer concerned perhaps formed his opinion from years of dealing with the evidence being a little anecdotal? Or did he use more statistical based records to form an opinion?

 

I don't know what the dealer in question said so its hard to comment but its difficult to criticise Marsh's work as what he gave us was really just a basis to take forward. He did not have the tools we have today to make his analysis and also one big important factor is that the coin world has changed out of all proportion since the advent of the Internet. When looking at the question of rarity you have to ask yourself if that should change because there are more collectors now wanting that coin? I don't think Marsh is far out with his Melbourne shield series assessment, but I am sure that one or 2 will need a tweak over the next few years.

 

Canadians are more common, and Australians are less common, than you’d expect

Hi Clive,

May I bounce some ideas off you?

This post is part observation, part inference, and part question on the subject of sovereign rarities. Are my observations correct, and are my inferences reasonable?

Daniel Fearon has estimated [1] that “Of the billion sovereigns that ever existed … the number of sovereigns in collectable grades is probably fewer than five million.” This half-percent survival rate enables me to give some approximate numbers to Michael Marsh’s rarity ratings [2]:

Scarce—1000 or so remain in collectable grades
Rare—several hundreds remain
Very Rare—100 or so remain
Extremely Rare—several dozen remain

OK. Now the survival rate for early 20th century sovereigns should be rather higher than the average, say one percent or so. But this doesn’t work for the postwar Australians—there are fewer of them than you’d expect; nor for the Canadians—there are more of them than you’d expect.

Michael, of course, used more information than this simple rule of thumb, but even his ratings suffer from the same problem. He gives R4 ratings to

1913C (mintage 3717),
1920S (mintage 360,000),
1923S (mintage 416,000), and
1926S (mintage 1,031,050).

Of these coins, the 1913C could well be the most common. It is certainly much more common than the 1920S.

So, why have Australians sovereigns disappeared in their millions, while Canadians (of which fewer than a million were minted) are still reasonably available?

It is may well be, as James Cullimore Allen believed [3], that the round numbers published by the Sydney Mint were the numbers authorized, and were much larger than the numbers issued. But can that really explain the size of the discrepancy?

This is where I start speculating. In another thread …

http://www.cointalk.com/t49579/

… I describe a couple of what I call “sovereign extinction events” in the US and the UK, which certainly affected London-struck sovereigns (most notably the 1917). Were the Australian coins caught up in these events, and was there another, Australian-specific, extinction?

According to John Sharples [4], Melbourne and Sydney sovereigns from the 1920s were entirely for backing the paper money issues. So they would have been kept in bank vaults and not issued to the public; unless, I suppose, someone turned up and demanded gold in exchange for bank notes. That could well lead to very few being left if officialdom decided there was no further need for the gold coins in the vaults.

It’s these sovereign extinction events that I suspect of being behind the shortage of postwar Australians.

I don’t think Canadian sovereigns circulated much either, but for a different reason. The agreement reached for gold coins from the Ottawa Mint was for gold sovereigns, each worth one pound sterling. But by 1908 Canada had long since, like the US, opted for a currency based on the Spanish-American dollar. So the coins were an instant curiosity, rather than useful money.

That would explain the tiny mintages of Canadian sovereigns … and it could also result in a lot of the coins being kept as keepsakes or in coin collections. This would protect them from being melted on an official whim; and would result in a steady stream of coins coming onto the market as Grandpa’s old coin collection ceases to have sentimental value to the next generation but one.

And that’s my speculation as to why Canadians are more common than you’d expect.

Later,

John

[1] Introduction to The Sovereign: The World’s Most Famous Coin: A History and Price Guide (Hillden Publications, 2001)

[2] The Gold Sovereign, Jubilee Edition (Michael A Marsh Publications, 2002)

[3] Sovereigns of the British Empire (Spink 1965)

[4] “Sovereigns of the Overseas Branches”, in Royal Sovereign 1489–1989 (edited by G P Dyer, Royal Mint, 1989)

 

1917 S British gold sovereign

Hi,

I'm a newbie here! Can anyone tell me approximately what this coin is worth?
It's in mint condition and definitely not counterfeit. Thanks.
Dakota725

 

Welcome to Coin Talk Clive!

 

Approximately $250 - $300 for MS62/63, more for a MS64/65 coin. Please note the value depends quite a bit on the price of gold.

 

Welcome to the site! Very exciting that you're writing a book, best of luck to you!

 

I apologize if I'm posting this in the wrong place but I just bought a coin on ebay and am wondering if it was a good buy. It is a 1974 New Zealand Day Commemorative Dollar and I paid $2.75 I'm new to this so please let me know what you think.

 

Thanks so much for the info.

 

hoping I shouldn't have started a new thread

The title of this thread is appropriate for my questions , no hijacking intended.

Mom has had me liquidating her junk silver ( stored away back in the 1960's ) since I 1st joined this forum and I got hooked on this whole coin collecting thing. I even started making a few stupid purchases off of eBay ( which I intend to hold onto as a reminder of what not to do again ).
Well now Mom is asking my to liquidate some gold coins she and my Father also packed away back then. I have mainly been focused on pennies and South American silver for my own beginning interest and have not paid attention to the gold collectors on this site since gold is out of my financial reach.

Sorry for the long explanation !

Please tell me if I should sell these for melt value or if ( in their beat-up condition ) they are worth more than melt. I have discovered via the man resources on the internet that 1928's can be more valueable than 1925's because the 1925's have been restricken over many years ( sort of like that rare 1780 Thaler I bought ... what a joke !!! ) . I have also been led to believe that sovereigns struck in Canada are usually worth more than Perth , Sidney , Melbourne & some others. The coins I have were all minted in S.A. so they are the least desirable.

My question is since I know these have been in storage for over 40 years & have no fear of them being Chinese knock-offs , should I have them graded even though they are in such bad shape in order to get the maximum I can for my Mom or should I just sell them for melt to a local dealer?

If I could , I would be buying everything my Mom is having me sell for her because of my fears of all the fakes entering the market , but I cannot afford them & they are not mine to make that decision.