Highlights from my latest haul

I had off of work for Veterans Day so I made a long-awaited trip to the LCS. They usually let me look through a lot of stuff they haven't gotten around to sorting through yet and I always find some interesting things. Here are some of my favorite early highlights.

 

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Second group: The 1918 Belgium 25 centimes is in very good shape for a coin of this series. I also got a few other denominations from WWI like this in very good condition. The Chinese coin below that is 5 cents from Yunnan and seems like a good find. The 1945 Denmark is actually a very rare date and books for possibly $100 or more. I don't know what the real-world value is. I haven't done any research yet on the Verdun medal but I assume it refers to the WWI battle there.

 

Finally two Indian coins I haven't had a chance to try to ID yet. Feel free to chime in if you know what they are.

 

Oh wow, can I search your dealer's stock sometime? Lots of neat coins here. My comments:

-I like the depiction of the Madonna and Child on the Hungarian piece.
-The Italian coin is scarce and interesting. It was struck in Tuscany, at the mint of Firenze (Florence) in 1860, the year before Italian unification. This is a transitional piece, with a denomination of "One Italian Lira" (rather than just one (local) lira) and Victor Emannuel has the title of "king-elect." The Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March of 1861, under King Victor Emannuel II. (He retained the numbering from his ancestral title as King of Sardinia.)
-The Puerto Rico 1896, two years before the US captured it in the Spanish-American War, is cool and scarce (Spain never struck much coinage for Puerto Rico).
-Yes, the medal commemorates the Battle of Verdun. The obverse has (in French) a popular slogan of the battle, "they shall not pass." (Which you may recognize was later reused by Tolkien in the scene with the Balrog)
-Chinese Republic coins are fun, I usually pick up any I see in a junk box. But the usual design, showing the multi-colored stripes of the flag on a single-colored coin, seems like a design fail to me.
-I don't think the top "Indian" coin is from India. The date of 1383 on the reverse is 1963/4 AD, and Indian state coinage ended before then. Bottom coin does look Indian and maybe identifiable with work.

 

Top Indian coin is from Yemen, 1/40 riyal possibly.

 

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I have noticed that you keep your lips pretty-well sealed as to the local of your treasure-hole LCS. Those are wonderful finds. Did you pay around scrap silver price for those Ag?

 

Thanks for your comments. Yeah, I was excited to see the Italian coin because I had never seen one from before 1861 that says Italy so I felt like I had something good. And I knew the Puerto Rico was special as well. I believe I had a 5 centavos previously but not the 10. I also try to get any Chinese coins I see. I'm getting better at identifying them.

 

Yeah, I don't really want to send other competition to my favorite shopping place. Most people here don't live anywhere near me but a few do. I kind of want it all to myself, though lately it seems like every time I go they tell me they just sold all their foreign junk bin stuff, but I still manage to find things.

What happened on pricing these was I was going through bins of coins and putting what I wanted in a pile, and then the employee would come and take a big bunch of them, look at them and return and say "$50 for this group" or whatever. So mostly I don't know what I paid for individual coins, but I think it was pretty reasonable. He wasn't looking most of them up so was just estimating. They were pretty busy or else he probably would have looked more up. My experience is you get the best deals on smaller coins because they tend to look at big silver coins and see value but the small ones don't look like anything even though often they can be big money coins.

 

Well, in any case, very well done!

 

Beautiful coins! Thanks for sharing. I live vicariously through posts like this; haven’t been to a LCS in too long.

 

I like many of these. Good instincts!
Here's my only "United Provinces of Central Italy" transitional coin:
50 Centesimi, 1860, "Vittorio Emanuele Re Eletto"

 

Hello, Hiddendragon. Are any of these latest buys going into a coin set of all nations/territories? It would be interesting to know how many different places you have coins from. Having a coin representing each nation and territory is one of my favorite ways to collect coins, but knowing what others have helps me learn what to put in such a set.

 

I don't see too many coins that are worth much but there are several that are quite scarce or rarely seen in that condition. As nice as these coins are it was the cu/ni Sierra Leone coin that really caught my attention. This one isn't worth much but it's tougher I believe.

You probably did well.

 

I don't have a formal count of all the places I have coins from but what I do is I have my coins in albums organized alphabetically by country. I basically try to make a type set of each place, keeping one or sometimes two examples of each type of coin I can get. I probably have between 10,000 and 15,000 world coins now (but who's counting?) so I have a lot of places. Getting those obscure colonies and city-states and things like that always excites me.

 

By this point anytime I see a coin I've never seen before, that's what excites me. Several items on this page fall into that category, like the Sierra Leone you mentioned. I purchased a lot of other coins on this trip and some are fairly valuable but I shared these because they are the most interesting to me.

 

I've seen only a few of these but most were in poundage back in the '80's and all were worn. I have to imagine they are a lot more worn today. Low mintage and worn coins often translates into scarcity for moderns. I'm not sure I have this one in Unc.


You never know with moderns because even the scarcest coins are priced at a dollar or two. And some moderns you can find by the buckets full are priced higher.

Puerto Rico is always easy to sell and sometimes at nice premiums. Rhodesia is tough. Russia is overpriced. Austria is usually pretty easy except for better dates and gems.

 

Funny story about not recognizing the value of moderns, I had some coins that I bought to give to my 5-year-old. One was a Japanese 50 yen I believe. So I put it in a 2x2 and I'm looking at my Krause to figure out the date. It turns out it's the key date in the series and I'm seeing them on eBay for $25. At that point I didn't really want to give it to him but I couldn't take it back. Just goes to show I would have never looked twice at that coin otherwise.

I always buy Rhodesia if I see it. The more obscure colonies are a particular numismatic interest of mine.

 

A lot of the early modern Japanese are really tough. the 10 Y coins from the early '50's for instance are impossible in true Unc and not nearly as common in AU as some suggest. I find the early 100 Y, especially those not in mint sets from the '60's tough. You can find a few AU's in this country but I doubt there are any in Japan.

Between natural losses and melting more than 90% of moderns no longer exist. With huge mintages this wouldn't be important except for the low savings rates and the fact that some series have suffered much higher attrition than others. Some coins were just never collected at all and then the circulating

 

WAY TO GO