Lord Marcovan's "Eclectic Box" collection as of February 9, 2018

The US collectors always default to the Dahlonega half-eagle (which is the only $4-figure coin here), and the Peacock. I got the latter in a swap here for my Monitor CWT, from @jester3681. I was mighty fond of the Monitor, so I initially tried to squeeze him for a few more bucks on top of the Peacock, but in the end it all shook out as an even trade, and I don't regret that at all now. I do miss the Monitor, but the Peacock is super sweet and has grown on me quite a bit. It was a good swap that turned out to be a win-win for both parties. And those are the kinds of trades I like, obviously!

The square (lozenge) shaped Nurnberg klippe is a fantastic design that I've loved since I had a holed example in my old Holey Coin Vest collection (which you see in my default avatar). I bought the present (unholed, high grade) example from @H8_modern. The little kid with the stick horse is just awesome, and there's an interesting legend behind that, which @chrisild shared here. The current pictures of the present coin are just marginal. I look forward to getting it PCGS slabbed with TrueView images soon.

Thanks. I thought of you when I bought the Indian coin.

Thanks. One could argue that such a mixed grouping would fall more under "accumulation" than "collection", but I do try to have some method to the madness, even if it's only evident to me half the time. I think as the collection grows, it will become an ever better sampling of the world's coinage and exonumia through the past two and a half millennia. Of course the coin selection is widely open to my own personal interpretation and interests, so I suppose an element of creativity enters the equation there. I do try to present this set nicely, though of course I have help from folks like @Deacon Ray, who assists with graphics like the banners and Photoshop templates you see here.

Yes, the King John penny you see in this update was Coin B in my recent poll about John pennies. The other coin, Coin A, which won by a wide margin in the poll, was one of my "bygones"- I sold it off during the "Box of 20" days when I was sticking to a limit of 20 pieces. I do miss it, but my old friend @Aethelred owns it now, so I get visitation rights when I go up to NC once a year to visit him. And the hoard pedigree on the new coin is great. The new coin is also very nice, if not quite as well struck as the old one. But it cost only half as much as the one @Aethelred ended up with!

Thank you. The dime is a brand-new purchase, from just this week. As to turning loose of stuff, it was hard sometimes. There were a lot of pieces I let go which I really miss now. But selling them allowed me to buy OTHER nice pieces, and keep things moving- without dipping into my paycheck. (I'd like to stay happily married, y'know! Ladymarcovan puts up with my hobby since it doesn't put a drain on the household budget.)

Sticking to the 20-coin limit for four years was educational. I'm sort of relieved to be done with that now, but I don't regret doing it. It was quite educational, and doing it for four years made this a better collection in the long run, I think.

Thank YOU. Compliments like this are my favorite kind.

Those full- and multiple-thaler coins don't come cheap. However, I got a 1768 Nurnberg thaler with a sweet cityview scene and a cool double-headed eagle in an ICG VF25 slab a while back, for only $200-something (versus the $500 the Zurich half-thaler here cost). That Nurnberg KM#350 type is reasonably affordable, considering the cool design and the full thaler denomination. You might want to consider something along those lines.

Also, some German States struck minors (like 6-kreuzer pieces and such) with cityview designs. The minor denominations are smaller coins and not quite so intricate, but still appealing, and almost certainly less expensive that the bigger half-thalers and thalers. Check out this Frankfurt cityview 6K piece which sold in an NGC UNC Details slab for less than twenty bucks! Granted, it was a minor denomination, and hairlined, and later date (1856), but you get the idea. ("Problem" coin or not, I think someone got a sweet deal there!)

As to your potentially more important question about valuing a potential purchase one knows little or nothing about: that's an excellent question. I must admit I "fly by the seat of my pants" quite a lot, and often when I make a purchase, I'm basing it entirely on gut intuition with little firm information beforehand. Of course I do try to do some "research" (which essentially amounts to 15-30 minutes of Google searches) before I take the plunge on an unfamiliar or semi-unfamiliar item.

Basically, if I see an item that I like, which appeals to me aesthetically and intrigues me, and the price doesn't seem too awful to me on a gut check, I'll do a short bit of Googling for similar pieces or useful info, and then I'll take the plunge and trust in fate.

Have I ever made a misstep? Sure. Who hasn't? But I don't think I've made any catastrophic ones, and have found that my instincts are basically sound most of the time.

When you see a coin that appeals to you on a number of different levels (regardless of how educated you are about it- or not- maybe especially if you don't know that much about it), remember that the same things that made it appeal to you will probably also appeal to at least a few other like-minded collectors.

My 2007-2008 introduction to ancients, when I worked on my first Roman collection, was very educational. I did most of my shopping on the VCoins online mall, so I'd be buying from reputable dealers instead of from the "Wild West" eBay marketplace. VCoins is nice because with a few keywords you can cross-check a coin for similar examples being sold by a number of different dealers, and get at least a vague idea of price ranges.

Learning to collect ancients, where there are no standard price guides and lots of arcane and often esoteric (but many very useful) information sources was a good schooling for me. It was there that I developed that "trust your gut" mode of operation. Had I stayed in US coins, or even more modern World coins, with priceguides like the Red Book or the online priceguides or the Krause catalogs to fall back on, I'd never have learned to strike out into the Great Unknown so confidently.

Sometimes one just has to go for it, and if you make a misstep- well, then that's just tuition in your education. I wouldn't recommend this for high-dollar material, of course. One wants to get one's education from affordable coins, at least initially. You can decide for yourself what budgetary "margin of error" you're comfortable with.

But that's the great thing about striking out into the unknown and "pushing the envelope". And having an "eclectic" accumulation collection, for that matter. You get to discover all kinds of great stuff. And my coins often teach me about their history after I have bought them! Everything I know about ancient Rome and its emperors, for example, I learned from owning their coins. And it wasn't until after I had bought them, and owned the coin, that I felt spurred to read up on that history.

The old maxim of "buy the book before the coin" is very sound advice- and great if you have a lot of money to buy books (but fewer coins). But I must confess that I seldom live by it. I like to "buy the coin and then learn more about it".

 

Nice set! Josh at CIVITAS sells some nice stuff. He posts on Collectors Universe. Not sure if he comes here.

My Puffin cost me only the slabbing fees, since I won it in a great pile of giveaway loot from @H8_modern. I think he was surprised when I sent it off to be slabbed and put it in the Eclectic Box, but I had always wanted one of these Lundy Puffin coins, ever since I first collected British coins in the early 1990s.

Congrats on those two! They're lovely!

PS- note how there's only half a puffin shown on the half-Puffin coin, while the full-Puffin coin has the whole bird on there. I thought that was a neat detail and didn't notice it until somebody pointed it out.

PPS- Speaking of not noticing details, until reading the CIVITAS stickers on your pair just now, I totally forgot about the lettered edges on these. I'll have to pull mine back out and look at it (in the edge-view slab, now, of course).

 

That must be fun. I haven't attended a show in exactly ten years, as of last month.

You being in NYC, I'm sure you have much more exposure to that sort of thing; shows and shops and such. Here in a medium-sized coastal GA town, I'm in a beautiful area, but it's a numismatic backwater. The nearest coin shops are an hour north (Savannah) or an hour south of here (Jacksonville, FL).

But I like my little town. And thank goodness for the Internet, right?