Steve D'Ippolito

I do tend to distinguish between my bullion stash and my collection; since the bullion is "generic" and have little collector value, and the coins' value depends entirely on a bunch of OCD collectors chasing them. (There's almost zero intrinsic value to, say, my 1802 cent, but it's worth at least 200,000 times face.) Collecting coins and stacking bullion are very different activities even if there is quite a bit of overlap between them. Proof precious metal coins are kind of in-between. Clearly made for collectors, but mostly valued for their metal content.

Wow, not just an '09 but the next two as well! Shazaam! game has changed. Suddenly we need a 1506.

Turkey Day.

Of course some might say it's a good thing because it introduces people to errors and overdates and the like. True but one could do it other ways, such as by putting the two or three of these items at the end of the album, clearly separate from the date/mint mark run. I at least am not OCD enough that I would insist on filling in that section, it's clearly separate. As long as we are on the topic of things being inappropriately lumped together by... ummm... Whitman, what the heck is the four dollar gold stella pattern doing amongst the regular issue coinage in the red book?

I'd love to see a paired list: one column would give a regular issue the other would include varieties and errors (date and mint mark varieties, doubled dies, other goofs like extra corn leaves or no edge lettering etc.) as the two modes of collecting are very different. Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine; coin album people giving space in a date/mint mark album to things like double die varieties if they just happen to be famous enough. You can complete a Lincoln cent set in fact without a 1955 double die, but the doggone album--sold to beginners for Pete's sake--has that very expensive hole in it. Why that particular variety and no others? Why not have holes for 1943 coppers and 1944 steelies? Out of what rectal database did they pull their criteria for deciding what should and should not irrelevantly be in the date/mint mark album even though it's just some sort of mint flub or inconsistency?

Yeah, I don't even want to go into the issue of strike! That needs a totally separate grade, honestly, because a poor strike is not post-strike damage. I've seen a ton of walkers with no trace of Liberty's had in MS holders. Yuck. I understand it can be a challenge to find a good one in some dates.

I was about to say "no way" but I looked at my almost-worn-flat pocket piece and the Д is raised like that on it, as well. That's not proof of anything however as the edge lettering is done in a different font (the coin is from the late 1890s) and does not discuss the purity (this was after Russia went to .900 fine). But it implies that the Д might be actually be OK.

So what's with all these people lately who post two or more identically titled threads?

The Netherlands got about as far into "modern art" type portraiture as one can get, back before the Euro, so I don't imagine cartoonish was all that novel. But you ask an interesting question, that could be applied to almost any monarch. It's easy to assume monarchs must be egomaniacs, putting their pictures all over the place. However, in 1796 Paul I, on the death of his mother Catherine the Great, was dissatisfied with the portraits produced (understandable, he was not what anyone would call handsome), and refused to be portrayed on the coinage. Once that precedent was actually set, Alexander I, Nicholas I, and Alexander II all refused to be portrayed on Russian coins (though Alexander I appeared on Polish coinage after he became the king of Poland). I suspect Paul had liberated them from the "need" to put up with having their mug struck into a coin. In the case of the two Alexanders and Nicholas, they eventually were portrayed on coins issued after their deaths, Alexander I (d. 1825) shown on commemoratives in 1834 and 1839, Nicholas I (d. 1855) on a coin in 1859, and Alexander II (d. 1881) in 1898. (I am going from memory on those dates, so please don't rely on them.) Only partway through the reign of Alexander III, in 1886, did portraiture of the reigning monarch resume--after a 90 year gap spanning four and a half monarchs. (And if you want to collect Paul's picture on a coin, it's *tough* as those pattern pieces are expensive as hell. When I put my Romanov Portrait Ruble set together, I "cheated" and used a clearly-labeled coronation medal that used the same or similar die.) This suggests to me that probably many monarchs detest their portraits on coinage.

Well, I just talked to a UK expatriate... and apparently the word "Britain" has a very nebulous meaning. ("Great Britain" means the island, England, Scotland and Wales, and Edward I "Longshanks" gets the win there as being the first to rule the whole thing, apparently.) Go back far enough and "Britain" could include Brittany in France, since it was inhabited (and still is) by Celts of the Breton tribe. The UK currently consists of "Great Britain and Northern Ireland." I was certainly thinking of "The Island of Great Britain" when I wrote my reply. So I made a mistake there, but I am not sure what the right answer actually is. I don't know what the original poster meant by it; I know a lot of Americans sloppily use it as a synonym for the UK (and for that matter, a lot use "England" as as synonym too).

So Vespasian was ruler of Scotland? That's part of what being the ruler of "Britain" would entail. England is only a part of Britain. My recollection is the Romans never did manage to subdue the Scots. I don't remember whether they were ever able to capture Wales. I would guess you want the name of the first monarch to be king of England, Wales, and Scotland simultaneously (Or alternatively, you just meant to say "England"), and I don't know who that is; but I know it was earlier than the United Kingdom was formed--all that did was put England, Wales and Scotland under the same parliament; they already had the same monarch. It's also true that those earlier emperors would have denied vociferously that they were monarchs; they were first citizens for life instead. A distinction without a difference to be sure, but Rome was proud of being a res publica after having overthown its ancient monarchy several hundred years earlier

Good post, ScottishMoney! I guess my prejudices show when it comes to soviet money; I can't get into the base metal stuff at all but the early silver is interesting to me; I own not only one of those 1924 rubles but somewhere around here is a star ruble as well (alas, artificially toned).

Well I did keep my BU 3 rubles. (But BU stands for beat up!) I generally carry it around at coin shows, if I get to talking with someone it's a great show piece because the series is moderately famous but most people have never seen one.

I have no idea where it went; it was in the World Wide Coins auction of November 2008. I'd imagine they are in Russia now.

I've suggested that too--that someone photograph every exhibit for ANA Archives or something like that. Never happened (and I was chair of the exhibits committee).

There was an entire exhibit at the ANA in Chicago this year, items made from pennies. Took first runner up for best of show, and by a first time exhibitor to boot!

It certainly turned out to be a good idea to buy Russian stuff before 2003 and sell it afterwards. There was a bit of a drop in early 2009 but I understand that it has mostly recovered since then.

The Russian Numismatic Society (which was an American based organization and its journal was in English) used to sell a "Russian Numismatic Dictionary."

You just happened to scratch one of my favorite topics. Stand back.... Platinum first came to the attention of Europeans in the 1700s, in what is now Colombia. Gold panners noticed flecks of something black (in small particles platinum looks black) in the gold they had panned. If you get images of Yosemite Sam screaming "Fifty Thousand Kronkites" from this you are mistaken. Far more likely the panners were grumbling about the caca blanca that was mixed in with their oro. It had to be meticulously separated, speck by spec, from their gold. What a pain. Very little could be done with this stuff; it couldn't even be melted with the technology of the time (the melting point was too high). It was a curiosity, somewhat more valuable than silver but less so than gold. The very word platinum comes from platina which is just Spanish for "little silver" (plata). The Russians, as I understand it still call it platina (платина). Mint workers did find a use for it; they'd buy some platinum dust and nuggets, and exchange it for some of the gold in a melt. They could pocket the oro and the platina was cheap--in fact it was a nuisance. Platinum could not be melted with the technology of the time, but it was gold soluble; it would dissolve into the liquefied gold. The end product--gold coins adulterated (!) with platinum--was hard to tell from the pure gold product because platinum would fail to react with acids just like gold--this is where the phrase "the acid test" came from by the way. The Spanish government had to outlaw platinum, and would buy the stuff up. (I understand that the temptation of having all this fakeable gold around was too great and that later on the Spaniards adulterated their own coinage with it deliberately.) Platinum was eventually discovered near the Ural mountains. Nuggets of it were found by the locals, some of whom even used them as shot in their shotguns, once they figured out it wasn't silver. (Can you imagine blowing a half ounce or more of platinum out the barrel of a shotgun?) Once people had had a chance to "play" with it a bit, platinum's first industrial use was sulfuric acid boilers. They would sinter plates of the stuff (heat it as hot as they could and ram it together hoping it would stick together--this created a "sponge" platinum), and make large casks of it (using gold solder for the joints), and pour sulfuric acid solution in it, to try to concentrate it by boiling off some of the water. The acid would eat almost anything, so the choices were glass (which could shatter under pressure--you probably didn't want to be around flying glass shards and splashing sulfuric acid separately, much less at the same time), gold (horrifically expensive) or platinum (expensive still but tolerable, even with gold solder used on the joints). The Russian platinum coinage was made out of sponge platinum as well, they'd run the raw material through the mines through a chemical process to try to get rid of iridium impurities (iridium was even more useless and it was a hardening agent--a bit tough on the mint presses), and eventually they'd have a solution of a platinum compound, they'd add something to it, and platinum dust would precipitate out and coat the bottom of the flask. This could be taken out of the flask then compressed under heat (work hardening it, incidentally) to create a slug of sponge platinum they could make the coins out of. The result was a dull gray metal, it never really looked shiny and lustrous (I spotted a fake 12 ruble once because it looked too lustrous). I have measured the specific gravity of two of the coins (my beat up 3 ruble which I still have, and my 6, which I sold in 2008) and in both cases the specific gravity came out lower than platinum's (21.45). I recall that the 3 ruble piece's SG was 20.5, which tells me it is probably about 5% air. [Gold comes in at 19.3, so even with five percent air, platinum is denser.] I had someone shoot it with one of those new x ray analyzers ("phasers") repeatedly at different spots (since the coin is not mixed alloy but a bunch of particles mashed together, so an impurity ought to show up as a concentrated "speck" in the coin) and the only significant impurity in it was iron, but not enough to make this kind of a difference. The coins were made on planchets the same size and shape as the 1/4, 1/2, and 1 ruble coins--that cut down on the amount of retooling the Russians had to do to implement the program. The three ruble pieces did occasionally circulate, but as I understand it, the 6s and 12s got used for nothing but trade with central and eastern Asia, and they simply sent them back as soon as they could find something they wanted to buy from Russia Only during the 1860s did it become possible to melt platinum in quantity, but that was after the end of the Russian Imperial platinum series. And sometime after that the catalytic properties of platinum (and the other platinum group metals, ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium) became known which sent the price straight up. Thousands of Russian platinum pieces were melted down, as well as old sulfuric acid boilers, to meet the demand. Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s. I bought a three ruble piece (beat up badly, bent, with two knife marks in it, probably for administering the acid test) in 1996 for an obscenely low price, located a six ruble piece a few years later, and finally managed to nab a twelve (and a more attractive 3) by the middle of 2002. I put on an exhibit with these coins, some platinum nuggets out of Siberia, and one platinum bar (the only piece of melted platinum in the whole exhibit), and took second runner up for best of show with it in New York (2002). Later after I improved my exhibiting style it became my first ANA summer show ("World's Fair of Money") best of show winner in San Francisco in 2005. I sold the three good coins in 2008, and often wished I had not. Dark gray and dull and unappealing to any magpie that they are, I "miss" them far more than anything else in that sale.

I've come to hate most sans-serif fonts for this very reason. "Illinois" looks like it starts with three capital "i"s or three lower case "L"s (and note I chose the cases inside the quotes to make the distinction clear). Newer versions of Windows come with a font that put a small tail on the lower case "L." I noticed in Europe that gas pumps use a cursive lower case "L" for the lower case "L" abbreviation for "Liter" since it could look like a capital I or even a numeral "1" (though in Europe they tend to put the barb on top of the 1, sometimes making it as big as the rest of the number--crossing their sevens to disambiguate).

Here's a better idea, if you expect to be doing this a lot: .0321507466 (troy oz / gram ) * 0.9 * 2.5 = 0.07233917985. That's the number of troy ounces in an unworn silver dime (post 1853). Multiply by ten: .7233917985. Drop the ridiculous one part in ten billion precision; inconsistencies in the minting process far exceed this, and *any* amount of wear would make it moot even if the mint were precise. 0.7234 is the number of troy ounces to a dollar face value. Take your face value, of whatever it is (dimes, quarters, halves--but NOT silver dollars), multiply by that number, then multiply by today's price of silver. The copper value is utterly insignificant next to this (what's the difference between $1.5737 and $1.5719? a fifth of a cent!) and might not even make up for how much wear the coin has undergone, which is totally unaccounted for here. For example, I have five silver quarters and two dimes, and the price of silver today is $21.73. The approximate melt value is: 1.45 (units face) * 0.7234 (ounces / unit face) * 21.73 ($/ounce) = $22.7932489 -> $22.79. This way you only have to keep one number in your head (0.7234), though you do have to remember to go get two other numbers and what to do with them. Again I emphasize that trealistically you only need four significant figures--even that's probably too many--because you do not know the price of silver to any more figures, and the computation does not compensate for worn coins. Besides your answer will get rounded to the nearest cent, or does someone pay with tax tokens? It's moot anyway, since the way junk silver is handled is the dealer specifies a price per dollar face to both buy and sell, and that's what you will get.

Well, I see you live in a place that has been a famous travel destination for centuries! (Apparently "Aprille" is the high season.) Welcome to the forum!

My 1799 might even beat kopeikin's 1800 but of course it's not the same year. And it's also not mine any more (sold, Nov 2008, WWC auction). I was collecting by type and needed a heavy and light of each silver denomination. Never did get the heavy poltina.

My impression was that proofs were made by the Philadelphia mint (hence no mint mark) through 1964. Am I having a moment of cranial flatulence here?

Yeah boats are another way to soak up a financial surplus!