Hadrian Sestertius

I thought it was a fair price.

 

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There is a huge price to pay for dishonesty. Many of us prefer no detail to fake detail. Dealers who get caught not describing tooling get a reputation as being shady driving off a certain number of patrons. There are some of us backing off from collecting bronze coins because we are not comfortable with spotting tooling. It is not a matter of a small deduction like we might make for a hole but a question as to what coin it was when we started. I know I have some tooled coins. How many? I'm not so sure.

 

I'm not an expert, just someone who tries to collect any Hadrians that cross my desk. I've handled a few dozen of his sestertii and to me it looks consistent with others. I agree with SKI that there is an issue with the toning, but I can't see any reason to call it fake from those images.

 

Good comments by Doug. Lanz is interesting; they sell tooled coins, but sometimes they will say out right they're tooled! (Pressure from people watching closely, I guess.) Much more disappointing to receive tooled coins without realizing it until they arrive. It's terrible to feel you've paid for something misrepresented.

 

If in fact there is some tooling on this coin, I just don't think it matters, at least to me. Ancients get cleaned and retooled and recolored and otherwise restored all the time. The question is rarely, "was the coin restored?" but rather, "was it restored properly?"

When I first saw the coin, I guessed that someone on vcoins or eBay could have listed it for $300, and it would have sat on the shelf, and the dealer would have wondered why nobody wants it. You put a coin up for auction with a low starting bid and no reserve, and it will generally sell for half of a vcoin listing or eBay BIN. That's why I think this coin did as well as it could have at $150. That's exactly as high as I would have gone, if I were in the market for it.

 

I have to agree with JA. I like this coin. If it's been tooled, I still like this coin. If I had been in the market I would have paid $150 for this coin as well. Curtis' comments are also valid. I would feel cheated if I received the coin and found out afterwards it had been tooled. But since it was identified thus in the listing, I would not have felt mislead or cheated. Personally, IMHO this coin was worth every penny it garnered.

 

Not sure i agree completely, but HA brings up an inte[HR][/HR]resting issue. When it comes to tooling, it's easy to recognize wholesale sculpting of legends from nothing as being way outside the generally accepted boundaries of good faith, honest, and preservation-minded restoration.

The extremes of acceptable and unacceptable are easily recognized, but there are clearly gray areas. When cleaning a coin one tries to dig crud from between characters in the legend. It's easy enough to discover you've used a tool too hard for the surface and etched an edge onto a letter. Or, one decides which areas to leave natural dirt and patina in and which areas to remove it from, hoping to enhance some details. After picking at and pressing on the features long enough, with the wrong tools, it's quite feasible to slightly reshape finer details.

That's a far cry from some examples mentioned, but I notice constantly when cleaning coins that i could be moving in a direction that might border on tooling. I don't intend to tool (or even know how it's done intentionally), but I think we have to accept that both restoration and tooling techniques are on a continuum and that both share the same end of improving appearance and/or value (of course, restoration is often motivated by other concerns, such s preservation, but I'm acutely aware of the overlap every time I pull out the picks and needles).