http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_Upper_Canada The above Wikipedia article includes the statement that the 1857 issue of the Bank of Upper Canada Bank Tokens is hard to find. Currently there over 100 offered on eBay. The article says that the Canadian government bought most of them as scrap bailing out the manufacturer who would have suffered when Canada switched to decimal coinage and melted most of them. This is not consistent with 100 eBay offerings. Who can tell me what I'm missing here? Are there restrikes?
It's not. I've had literally perhaps 70 pass through my hands over the past four months. I found one behind my desk a couple weeks ago. It's a neat coin, but not scarce or valuable. Mintage was about 1.5M. The 1854 is something like 750K.
Since when does anyone believe something written on Wikepedia? These are nearly as common as dirt, which is why you can pick them up anywhere (say VF-20 and below) for $5 of less. You'll even find these from time to time oin the dollar nins at coin shows. Wikepedia articles are written by private individuals (you can submit one if you like) and then are supposedly vetted or checked for accuracy, but much of Wikepedia just contains internet pipe dreams, suppositions and are one step up from a blog.
Wikipedia is not a monolithic entity, as Bill points out. However, I've found that most of the articles on Classical history are quite good. If nothing else, it's a great place to find bibliographies for further reading. It's a very handsome token, Doug. Nice find.
The whole point of Wikipedia is that when someone posts something wrong, someone else posts a correction to it. They occasionally have to mediate fights over conflicting facts but something like this should not stand. I could make the correction but I am not a Canadian specialist and do not understand where the author of this bit was coming from when he wrote such incorrect information. Rather than staeing that 1857 is the rare one, I could see it being quoted as the most common one because of the large number of remainders and the early dates mentioned as the rare ones. On the other hand, I see no reason that the line should not just be deleted. Much of Wikipedia (spell it their way) is copied directly from sources the people who will not use it worship. The comment about pipe dreams and suppositions can equally well be applied to hardcopy published and peer reviewed textbooks if we look at the big picture. The benefit of the Internet as a whole is not that it contains no error but that there is a process by which error can be corrected while something stupid Einstein wrote on paper will live forever an be quoted by those who believe that anything read in a book must be true. I've never been perfectly clear on what a Blog was (other than one step down from Wikipedea) so I looked it up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog and was taken by how similar early forms were to what I was doing in 1997 but calling it my web pages. In the last couple decades we have seen significant format changes in the way information is distributed. This can be information on weighty subjects or fluff websites on ancient coins. Libraries have tossed out their card catalogs and many even ditched their Reference sections to make way for Internet connectivity. I remain curious on the format of the next step for information sharing. We now are obviously in a transitional period but I suspect that the future will never settle down out of what seems to be flux to those who believe in the good old systems of the past. Wikipedia will last until someone updates its process just like we now can edit its content.
Great new "modern" pickup, Doug ... both, the obverse and the reverse are very cool ... => yup, it's simply amazing how many super-cool things come from Canada, eh? Ummm, well at least our coins, our beers and our hockey players seem to be desirable exports!! => again, that's a pretty neat addition to your amazingly diverse collection!!
According to coinsandcanada the 1857 Half Penny has a mintage of 3 million which is fairly high for the time. I am not 100% sure where they got their number from though. I find it funny that these are 'common as dirt' because with that mintage number if it was a group of American collectors it would be considered a 'semi-key' date wouldn't it?
Modern collectors really place too much emphasis on mintage numbers (says the ancient collector). It is not a question of how many were made but how many still exist. What I read suggested that the government failed to cancel the 1857 order which came just before Canada switched to decimal coins so it makes sense that the bulk of the 1857 issue would survive in high grade. There was a reference that said they melted many of them but if few actually circulated and they melted 2/3, there could easily be a million out there flooding the market. Most real rarities carry stories that account for why most of the many made were destroyed; some really common coins have stories of how they came to be common. When I was younger the US started releasing bags of silver dollars from their vaults and it turned out that many were 1904 dates that had previously been considered rare.
Collect Newfie coins!! => they all have low mintages and they're all cool & they're all fairly inexpensive!! ... I'm just sayin' ...
Justin who? ... It's kinda funny, because he's not that popular in Canada ... => apparently we traded him to you guys for 3 cartons of Marlboros and an autographed Michael Jordan ball
I will echo what Dougsmit and Steve mentioned previously about mintage figures. I would say that well over a million of these 1857 tokens still exist, probably closer to 2 million. If there are only 500 collectors of preconfederation tokens, the supply far outweighs the demand and the prices remain low. For regular US coinage, if there was a similar mintage figure, but 10,000,000 collectors then demand would far outweigh supply and prices would rise appreciably and keep going. If you want to see some whacked out 'price vs mintage' figures, just look at Newfoundland coinage (they had their own until 1947) as was mentioned before. You have mintages of well less than 500,000 where VF's sell for less than $5 at any show and mintages less than 50,000 less than $10. What do you think that a mintage of 38,400 would go for in the US? ... the Newf 1947 5 cent in AU can be had for less than $50 and in VF for less than $10. The dimes for 46 & 47 essentially the same with mintage figures of 38k and 62k. Mintage figures need to be taken with a grain of salt when considering price ... demand means much more and that depends on the number of collectors in that specific (even grade) area. I still think that the original 1857 token is a keeper and something that a collector of any country/denomination would love to have in their collection .. and at a great price.
That information in the Wikipedia article wasn't just made up by someone, but stems from the book The Copper Tokens of Upper Canada by Robert Wallace McLachlan (1916), who stated that while the mintages of the 1857 issues were large, most of them remained in bank vaults for several years until they were sold to a coppersmith and melted down. Now, based on my personal experience in collecting these St. George Provincial pieces, I can tell you that the 1857 does seem to be readily available and supports that likely many of these were actually released into circulation. What I do know from several years of hunting for these tokens is that they are difficult to find in good condition. There was an drastic shortage of copper halfpenny and penny coinage in Canada during this time, and these St. George tokens (along with most other provincial and pre-provincial tokens of Canada) circulated heavily. Most are in VF condition or less. XF and AU pieces can be found with patience, and true MS examples are very scarce. The definitive work on the many varieties of these St. George tokens was written by Dr. Eugene Courteau in 1934 (The St. George Copper Tokens of the Bank of Upper Canada); he died just a few months after it was published. Very few people collect the series by Courteau number, and many times it is not even possible to clearly identify the variety on well worn pieces. I have two MS graded tokens -- both 1857 halfpennies. They are both true uncirculated pieces with lots of luster, and the one in MS65 is one of my favorite coins in my entire collection from among 300+ horse related items and several hundred other various coins.
The examples shown are quite scarce, and I'll be interested in what the new book has to say about them. Thanks for the very clear photos...
If you ever find yourself relying on a WikiPedia article, don't. Click through to the references and see if they're true primary sources or just other ill-informed chuckleheads.
That’s partially because modern collectors have the advantage of actually having mintage figures available, in most cases. One notable case where mintage information is conspicuously absent is tokens, such as Civil War tokens. Tokens tend not to attract nearly the interest of coins, so you can pick up a CWT that would be a true rarity in US coinage, going by survival numbers, but pay anywhere from a couple hundred to a thousand dollars. And, even the most common CWT has a mintage far below that of a 1916 Standing Liberty quarter, which retails for thousands of dollars in very low grade. You can easily spend as little as $25 on a mid grade, common CWT. There are even a lot of cases where the rarity to price ratio is out of whack within US coins. Take, for instance, the aforementioned 1916 SLQ vs any seated dollar with comparable mintage or survival estimates. You’ll find that, head to head, comparing coins of equal grade, the seated dollar will probably run you 1/10 to 1/2 what the SLQ would, up to certain point (many seated dollars are rare to nonexistent in gem grades, for instance).
