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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;nerosmyfavorite68, post: 25959737, member: 134416&quot;]The raw ones aren&#039;t photographed, but Santa was good to me this year.&nbsp; Unfortunately the LCS mainly has slabbed ancients, but the Pompey,Jr. is a type I&#039;ve been wanting for a long time.&nbsp; I used the NGC lookup photos.</p><p><br /></p><p>Aaron Berk has addressed the negative comments (brushed, in this case), and the risks of encapsulating an ancient which isn&#039;t gold or silver, since most AE&#039;s are cleaned in a way that they would incur negative comments.&nbsp; Unless it&#039;s something really bad like tooling or bronze disease, just knock down the (fairly useless) surface rating and be done with it.&nbsp; I&#039;d also grade it at F+, but it could pass for a modern VF, I suppose. Like a Numisforums member opined, a grade for an ancient coin with a picture is kind of superfluous, anyway.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1651984[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1651985[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>My second favorite was a raw coin of Odessos, Thrace.&nbsp; Here&#039;s the ID tag.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1651986[/ATTACH]</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The Anonymous follis was in a big, dumb megaslab, a slab within a slab, with one side featuring a picture of Christ and a small history of the Basil II anonymous folles (which came 60+ years before this, weren&#039;t even the first ones, and had nothing to do with this).&nbsp; The slab is big and thick enough that it&#039;s free-standing.</p><p><br /></p><p>Unlike the magnificent Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, Nicephorus III was an elderly general who was out of his league during a time of extreme crisis, and didn&#039;t do that much.&nbsp; He was overthrown by the capable Alexius I.</p><p>&nbsp; </p><p>[ATTACH=full]1651987[/ATTACH] </p><p><br /></p><p>I didn&#039;t have a Class I, by the way.</p><p><br /></p><p>There was also a NGC Widow&#039;s mite and a couple of raw Byzantines from a budget collection offered as stocking stuffers.&nbsp; The patinas are so dark on those that they&#039;re hard to ID and will be even harder to photograph.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I don&#039;t really collect the fractionals so my ID skills weren&#039;t the best, but Sear&#039;s book worked it out for me, it&#039;s a K not an XX, so it&#039;s Maurice Tiberius.&nbsp; The other is pentanummia of some sort.</p><p><br /></p><p>Oh, I forgot, there&#039;s an NGC Andronicus II Basilikon.&nbsp; I don&#039;t really collect the late stuff, but it&#039;s only the second one I have, and it&#039;s kinda neat.</p><p><br /></p><p>My folks don&#039;t heavily shop online and it&#039;s generally whatever the coin store has (sometimes nice coins are there), but the top two coins were a big hit.&nbsp; All the coins ranked an A+ on the thoughtfulness and generosity scale.&nbsp; The widow&#039;s mite and anonymous follis are also very Christmas-related.</p><p><br /></p><p>If I were less of a klutz and had some decent tools, the slabs would go bye-bye and they&#039;d be raw coins.&nbsp; That can always be fixed at some later date.</p><p><br /></p><p>This is the coin I gave my father, a nice denarius of Trajan:</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1651988[/ATTACH]</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>The LCS specializes in American coins, and is fairly well-known for it.&nbsp; It isn&#039;t the glory days of Mark Mendelssohn&#039;s coin shop, but it&#039;s nice to have an LCS that carries ancients.&nbsp; Generally speaking, slabbed ancients aren&#039;t really intended for the hardcore ancients collector, more for the modern collector who is used to slabs and who might dabble in ancients.</p><p><br /></p><p>All in all, it was a pretty good year for the LCS.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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