so I decided to pick up some more rolls today and came across a very nice and reflective 1966 Canadian Nickel. A 53 year old coin looking so good? Has it been cleaned or did someone dump it from their collection for beer money? Is it even possible to determine in a photo? Regardless, an empty slot has been filled, yea!
It was probably saved for decades before being released into circulation. I still have tubes of '73-D RD Lincoln cents, all bright & shiny, that I acquired in a bulk purchase about 20 years ago. Chris
Definitely not a cleaning in my opinion. That nickel was likely saved by someone for years. Furthermore, it is not that uncommon here in the states to find Mint State Canadian coins from the 60s in foreign coin boxes.
You can find some of the same thing in U.S. Lincoln Memorial Cents. Back in the early 1960s, rolls of BU coins were all the rage. Historically dealers had set coins aside for future sales. They paid face value for them or very close to it. Over the years they sold the coins as singles, sometimes for excellet mark-ups. This is how most of the BU modern coins we collect today ended up getting saved. People began see that their might be money to be made by saving rolls, so a big market wave got started. The trouble is when many, many coins are saved, you end up with an over supply, and the price drops like a stone. I can remember club auctions where people would put up rolls of cents from the 1960s, and you couldn't get a bid for more than face value. There was money to be made on pre-1965 silver coins because of their bullion content. Even today a roll of 1964 Kennedy half dollars isn't worth much more than the junk silver price.
