Today, I had mine "wow I'm an idiot moment". As I had the afternoon off, I went to my local coin shop out here on the island, Miller's Mint (probably the only coin store in Suffolk County I will deal with). As they are extremely nice folk, they don't mind a younger broke collector into world coins searching through their junk box stock. I sat therefor about 2 and a half hours, as they dumped 20 pounds of new stuff into the by-the-pound mid/low grade box. After pulling out about 3 lbs of stuff and culling it don to 2.5, I happily went home. In the junk-box this week there was a LOT of pre-decimal Great Britain coinage. I couldn't resists and grabbed handfuls of post-silver 6 pence and shilling coins, as well as a cart-load (ok, a slight exadducation) of pre 1930's farthings, halfs and large pennys. As I was sitting down tonight going through mint dates on the Shillings, I noticed something weird. On a bunch of Elizabeth 2nd shillings the # of lions inside the shield changed. Some had 3 some has 1. At first I was stumped for a god minute or two, then it came to me: Scottish shillings. I was aware of the previous monarch's issuance of shillings in both English and Scottish varieties, but the design was so obviously different that I noticed it right away when I got into G.B. coinage. With Elizabeth 2'nd, I did not. And I have looked at the shilling section of Krause too many times to make that mistake. Off to my G.B. set I went and had do dismantle half of the Elizabeth 2nd shilling set into two sections, one for English crest one for Scottish. Moral of the story? No matter how many varieties of Queen Victoria portrait I can tell apart w/o a lope, I still made an obvious mistake that a cub scout could have called me on. Live and learn! On the upside, I now have twice the coins I need for Elizabeth 2nd set. back to the hunt!
I feel for you there. Occasionally I will still have to pull out my collection and reference the coins in question, even though I supposedly documented every coin in Excel and scans.
In a way I wish they had never issued the Scottish reverse shillings, because they cause fleaBay searches to pop them up, so that I have to type -shilling* so that I don't have to see the things. That said, I own hundreds of them.
