Cabinet tone is not a priority for me, buuuuut....

I think most cabinet toning takes place in old cigar boxes.

I think most "cabinet friction" is circulation wear too.

These terms have endured, though nobody has cabinets anymore.

 

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My favourite toned bronze:


and a silver Alexander tet with gold toning:

 

I like this toning:


Roman Republic
Province of Macedonia
Thessalonika Mint
Quaestor Aesillas (BC 90-70)
AR Tetradrachm 28 mm x 16.50 grams
Obverse: Flowing hair bust of Alexander the Great, Greek legend, MAKEDONWN (Macedonians) TH mint mark behind bust
Reverse: Club of Hercules center, Coin Chest left field, Quaestor's chair right field. Surround be a wreath. Latin Legend - AESILLAS
Ref:BMC 81-83; Dewing 1224-1225
ex: Nathan Miller Collection


Roman Republic
Anonymous, 280-275 BCE
AR Didrachm (20mm, 7.28g, 11h)
Uncertain mint (Neapolis?)
OBV: Helmeted head of bearded Mars to left; oak spray to right
REV: Horse’s head right, wearing bridle, on base inscribed ROMANO; to left, stalk of grain.
REF: Sear 22; Crawford 13/1; HN III 266. Sydenham 1
COMMENTS: Minor reverse corrosion. First AR coin struck by the Romans...
Crawford in "Coinage and Money under the Roman Roman Republic", (pg 29), claims that this coin may have been minted EARLIER, perhaps 312-308 BCE to pay for the building of the Via Apppia from Rome to Capua
From a Swiss collection, formed in the 1990's

 

I will soon start a thread on my three wins in the Goldberg 96 auction, but I think this one belongs in a thread about toning:

 

Dang.

 

You know I never thought about it, but looking at the Tet. I bought I'm thinking it may be cabinet toning.



What do you guys think?

 

I like toned silver, too, but a coin that has not been cleaned for a long time is often a bit darker than we might prefer. Do we like them still when the color is gone and the coin is dark gray? The billon tetradrachm of Septimius Severus below was in a collection in 1901 or before (Dattari). To clean it would be criminal. I wonder what it looked like in 1901. In 194?

 

I like it @dougsmit and I wouldn't touch it. I came across this Bostran drachm recently, very dark with some sand deposits. It would be criminal to clean this one as well, imo...

 

I have this JC silver coin that over time has turned black. One might say it is toning, but I think it looks like tarnish. I got it out this afternoon to take another picture, but it's so dark I can hardly get a good image. I wonder if I should clean it. Thoughts?

 

Leave it be. I think it looks good and ancient. My experience with cleaning is that half the coins I clean I improve, the other half I ruin. The problem is I can't seem to predict which is going to happen when.

 

I'd leave it like that, but if you must absolutely clean it then try something gentle like 1/2 distilled water, 1/2 ammonia. Lemon juice might be too harsh on that deep toning.

Also try pure acetone first. Sometimes it will lighten toned silver enough that no additional cleaning is needed, and also will not damage the coin surface.

Lemon juice should be a last resort in my opinion. Some people use it a little too freely. It is an acid, so it does remove some silver each time it is used.

 

I agree with JA. However, if the silver quality is good, which this appears to have, I might be inclined to give it brief lemon juice baths to lighten it up. I think this is a good candidate for gentle cleaning.

 

Toned Silly!

 

Hear is RR Cabinet tone that don't think I have shown here before. Shot it with axial lighting to bring out the rainbow.

Roman Republican L. Aemilius Lepidus Paullus Denarius, Rome, 62 BC.

Obv: PAVLLVS LEPIDVS CONCORDIA around veiled and diademed
head of Concordia right.
TER PAVLLVS above and beneath L Aemilius Paullus standing
left, one hand touching a trophy, Perseus and his two sons
as captives standing on the left.

 

Very nice, @TJC. You could start an iridescent toning thread with that one.

 

"Cabinet toning," used correctly, is the grey or brown color that a bright coin slowly achieves after residing for many decades (or hundreds of years!) in a cabinet. "Cabinet friction," used correctly, is post-circulation wear to the high points of a coin after many decades (or hundreds of years!) of very gradual rubbing against the soft-lined surfaces of a cabinet. The Abafil trays that some of us use to house our coins certainly qualify as cabinets in this sense, although the rubbing is fortunately minimized by the fact that the trays stack and are lifted out, rather than being sliding drawers as was once the case.

At any rate, even if there were no modern cases approximating the cabinets of the past, "cabinet toning" and "cabinet wear" would still be meaningful and useful terms. Fun fact: save the fortunately very infrequent modern loss to fire or other calamities, the cabinet-housed coins of past collections are still around in today's collections. They don't expire and go poof after their warranty runs out.

 

I know that, I was being more tongue-in-cheek suggesting that the terms are frequently applied to coins that have never spent a minute in a cabinet.

Cabinets were more popular in Europe than the US, so I always get a chuckle seeing US coins claiming to be "uncirculated with a touch of cabinet friction." Most of the time, the coins are just lightly circulated. I really don't think there were many 19th and 20th century American collectors who had furniture pieces for displaying rare coins.

Since the popularity of slabs, those terms have largely fallen by the wayside for US coins.

I also feel like the grand old collections of the 18th century, especially the valuable ones, have largely ended up in big institutional collections, and really are not circulating among collectors anymore. It's rare to be able to trace a provenance before 1800. The vast majority of the coins in my collection have been found relatively recently in the era of metal detecting.

 

Fair enough. Certainly the terms are mostly obsolete for US coins. I hardly study that market, but from a comfortable distance it does seem that "cabinet toning" is used very imprecisely there to describe any color other than bright white. And for sure you're right that pre-1800 coins are encountered very infrequently on the market, although of course it's not quite unheard of. Coins with a 100 year old provenance are somewhat easier to come by though, and 100 years is quite sufficient a length of time to beautifully tone coins under the right conditions.

For the record, I've never done a tally, but I guess over half the coins in my own collection have "lived" in earlier collections for a long time, although I certainly have newer finds as well.

 

I forgot where but I once saw reference to a new age form of cabinet friction caused by coins in big cities close to underground subway lines that cause a bit of vibration every time a train passed through. The things we do to destroy what already survived 2000 years.

I have known a couple collectors that were still using very nice furniture cabinets. I knew one who had a really great wooden pillar with a screw off top and stack of round trays inside. What burglar would suspect that there might be something inside but he might steal the thing itself just because it looks valuable as art.

 

Ummm, here is a nice coin cabinet in my living room ... "click" on it



Sadly, due to the size of my cabinet collection, it now resides downstairs in the big-ass gun safe ... not quite as "pretty" ... but it's still pretty sweet!!