https://www.etsy.com/listing/651596...9D58bMQl1&eaid=485381269015&x_eaid=de033955d5 I did send them an e-mail explaining the error & they wrote back that they going by the written description that came with the coin .
Etsy.... Maybe throw in one of these ...marketed as "a great Easter gift". Although at $10.95 you can get better bang for your buck at Home Depot.
There is only one reason I can think of that you were looking at ancient coins on Etsy: Are you dyslexic and thought you were typing Esty? Valentinian, do you get a lot of mail for Etsy?
I don't know Ancients, so I'm assuming that the coin is not what the seller says it is? Did you notice that on the paper in the pic you can see an entire line of writing has been blacked out with magic marker? I wonder what that said? Something about the coin being an imitation, commemorative copy?
Actually I saw the coin on Pinterest, where I do post photos of some of my coins. I also enjoy looking at the photos of glassware & oriental art on Pinterest. Like CoinTalk, it costs nothing to join their website & many dealers & collectors post there. Someone copied that photo from Esty & posted it on Pinterest. And no I'm not dyslexic, are you?
Hookman, When I saw the coin posted on Pinterest It was labeled "Gordian III", & of course it isn't, It's an antoninianus of Philip I. The two portraits look nothing alike.
That looks like a Littleton Coin Co. attribution flip with the "Littleton" crossed out. I see this kind of thing on eBay a lot - the coin and the flip get switched around.
What made it funny was the write up for Gordian included the fact that he was killed by Philip I whose coin this was. The legend is clear and includes PHILIP. Gordian's coins all include GORDIAN. They are among the most common coins to the point that there was a running joke here for quite a while where Gordians were called 'cockroaches'. It is sad to have to explain jokes but it seems many of posters here now are new to ancients and/or Coin Talk. The company selling this coin for about double its fair value is Etsy while the last name of a dealer among our most active CT participants is Esty ('Valentinian') . If you do a Google search for Valentinian's last name, you will get "Showing results for etsy" because Google makes a lot of money selling hits to that spelling and assumes you were misspelling that name.
Just in case anyone wants to check out it out, here's Valentinian's website: http://augustuscoins.com/index.html
Etsy isn't selling this coin, they are only a marketing arm like Ebay. The actual seller is DecaturCoinNJewelry, from Decatur, Illinois. I can't imagine any business selling material they don't even look at. As you pointed, out a quick glance at the coin & description should have been enough to ring a bell . I wouldn't expect Etsy to spot something like this but a company selling coins should. These clowns even have a 5 star rating .
It was probably the name "Littleton", as Marsyas Mike said, along with the original selling price, which was probably around $30.
Definitely a Littleton flip-ticket. Littleton had (and may still have for all I know) an "ancient coin of the month club" sort of promotion running in the 90's. The coins were generally decent, although not spectacular, and definitely overpriced given general market values of the time. I "subscribed" for a short while - you can always return anything you get from Littleton so the only risk was the price of postage to send things back - which I did just about every time. Etsy has certainly changed since I sold there in the mid "aughts" - it seems almost indistinguishable from ebay now. I did pretty well selling dateless buffaloes for a couple of years, back when there were almost no other coins on etsy. When it came to an end it was a total end, no "tapering off" of sales - someone had evidently undercut my price and successfully siphoned-off all of the potential market for dateless buffaloes. There is a hilariously funny book you might be able to find at amazon or somewhere similar: "Regretsy" (sorry, I don't recall the author's name) - I, and my daughter who at one time sold on, and had introduced me to etsy both laughed until we cried reading it.
Whenever I need a good laugh I go to Etsy and look at coins. Don't feel sorry for them- the ones with extreme extreme prices are probably money launderers or drug dealers.
lehmansterms, Thanks for your post. I've never done any business with Etsy, buying or selling, & probably won't in the future. About 7 years ago I opened an account with Ebay selling oriental antiques which lasted nearly a year. Considering the time & effort I put into it I must admit it wasn't successful. A number of ignorant & sleazy buyers challenged the authenticity or attribution of some objects after receiving them & Ebay held up due payments for a long time; often these scumbags tried negotiating for a better price while Ebay had my payments on hold. All the negative experiences I had on Ebay came from overseas buyers, usually Asians. I know some people have had good luck with these "marketing arms" & many of these sellers grossly overprice their goods to an ignorant public. They make doing business on an honest level difficult for other sellers.
