What do you do with a few kilos
of coins that are in my opinion, of too low a grade or value to sell individually?
What I tend to do is let them
pile up in boxes around the room but this does not seem to me to be the
best use of resources.
I have thousands of coins that
could be sold in job lots or roughly sorted by category such as 19th
century Europe or common British minors, so if anyone is interested, drop
me a line at Afantiques
The nicer coins are mostly being
listed on ebay ( see
my auction list ) as they come along and I am always searching the
back streets and smelly auction rooms of Birmingham and the Black Country
for tokens, pre 1800 British and any decent Americans that might be lurking
undiscovered.
Grading
I must confess to amusement at
the american fad for putting coins in plastic boxes and attaching grades
that are so precise no two people will ever agree on them. If it were not
for the fact that some cunning folk have contrived to make a great deal
of money out of the MSxx obsession I think even the users would give the
whole thing up as a bad job. When the standard injunction is ' buy the
coin, not the slab ',why bother with the slab at all.
I prefer to collect and deal in
real coins, that is coins that are simply examples of normal circulating
denominations, produced for use not ornament, and in the grades that I
prefer, freakishly saved from the normal wear the makes most coins simply
'average circulated'.
Some coins did escape use for
some reason of other and they are the ones that shine out like beacons
in a dark and stormy world when they are found. How I bless those folk
who placed a handful of shiny new coins in a drawer a couple of hundred
years ago and just left them.
Because the coins that I look
for are real rather than made to be preserved, EF (Extremely fine) is about
as good as they come, with true UNC (uncirculated ) in the hens teeth class.
For the older material VF or even F are presentable examples
I try to err on the low side when
grading, and average circulated anything tends to wind up in a junk box,
unless even average circulated is very hard to find
(Space reserved for some grading
examples)
Back
to Afantiques