Just bought my first, a 1822 Bolivia. I cant find mintage, price guide, etc. that is much help. I can see that 1 million plus coins were minted around that time, but can't assume much from that. Is Sedwick's Practical Colonial Coins and Shipwreck Reference a good source? I'll be posting a picture and questions when I receive the coin. Thanks for any help.
I have 7 books on Spanish colonial coinage, plus the Krause catalogs, remaining in my library, and not a one of them provides mintage numbers. And they are the most popular books there are on the subject. And I think of all those I sold, none of them had mintage numbers either. Now that's not to say the mintage numbers cannot be found, there are those who have such info. But back then the colonial mints didn't even keep track of the number of coins, they tracked the weight of silver, the number of marcs, that were minted at a given time, and into what denominations. For example, they were required to mint 68 reale coins from each marc of silver. And the smaller denominations changed somewhat proportionally, but not exactly so. What I'm getting at here is that once you have that info, you can then translate into the number of coins. But if it's of any help to you, the coin you're talking about is a pretty common one which means it had a fairly high mintage. edited to correct oooops
Brown's Fan, the mintage figures you are looking for in this particular case (Potosi 1822 8R) do exist. A book entitled 'Economia Colonial y Regimen Monetario Peru: Siglos XVI-XIX' by Carlos Lazo Garcia has them. He transcribed the old colonial records. In this book they are listed by date and denomination in marcos, and it is easy to calculate strikes from that as GDJMSP says. 1 marco = 8 1/2 strikes of 8R coins. Unfortunately, this book is really difficult to get ahold of.
