grivna1726

For $120, you could have gotten the book. A collection of scans would be painful to use compared to having the physical book. These books were printed in small quantities and there is a real market for scarce numismatic literature (if you don't believe me, check out a Kolbe auction sometime). At $120, the book is a wonderful deal and in future years will probably bring much more when sold. But your CDs won't. In my opinion, you got a bad deal.

I hope you will be able to help me. Many years ago, I bought a small group of shooting medals. A scan of one of them is shown below. I do not own a copy of Martin or any later works, so my remarks below are taken from my old notes about this piece. The medal is from Bern (Langenthal) 1899. It is silver and apparently of the type of Martin-151. The bear is as shown in Martin, but the other side is not. The Swiss Miss has her hair braided differently and the names of both Munger and Homberg appear in the field (while only Homberg appears on the Martin piece) and it does not have "Bern" on it like the Martin illustration does. I will be grateful for any information you might be able to offer. Thanks!

You'd have to ask him. I don't know what his plans are for it.

Here is a picture of Ken Bressett's jeton (believed made about 1680). The Latin legend "OPPORTUNUS ADEST" translates as "It is here at an opportune time." Whatever "it" is, is not entirely clear.

Ken Bressett has the first one I have "seen" on the net. A French dealer had one in his listings and I emailed twice expressing a wish to purchase it. My emails were apparently ignored because I did not receive even an acknowledgement, let alone a reply. Good luck finding one!

I'm not sure where this thread was originally posted, but it's a good one. I find that stamp and medal collectors often have a greater appreciation of the historical and political importance of the objects they collect than coin people do. And I will say so fearlessly while wearing my asbestos suit.

Antikvarius provides excellent service. Prices are reasonable and the books arrived quickly. I would not hesitate to buy from him again. "Contact-System" is less expensive than Western Union as a way to pay.

That is an excellent set.

It is also the rare revised portrait type without the hair ribbon. And a wonderful example of it as well! This one is yours, correct? It is a collector's prize.

I think it is Dutch, not German. A google books search found a numismatic book "Handleiding voor Verzamelaars van nederlandsche Historiepenningen" By G. Van Orden (Published 1825). Your jeton appears to be #1357 as shown in the picture below: Now all you need is someone who is fluent in Dutch to translate it!

Thank you. Gorny sold this one last year (not to me ).

We have a similar situation and a similar problem. Here is my Slavic date 1707. I had a dream to get an Arabic date 1707 as its companion but that is now out of my reach because of pricing.

A beautiful example of a very scarce issue! Is it yours, BKB? If so, then congratulations on such a worthy acquisition for your collection!

This is a fascinating and well-researched thread. Thank you for posting it.

Thank you for your kind words, gx. I like it too.

Hello Mariah and welcome to this board. It's difficult to make any intelligent remark about a coin that is unseen. "Excellent condition" can mean very different things to different people. A few sharp, high resolution pictures would be very helpful. I don't know about 1836-dated examples specifically, but for the 30k/2zl coins as a type, I would guess about $300 in EF and about $700 in UNC, but as I said, those are just guestimates and might easily be wrong.

Your coin was struck at the Warsaw ("MW") mint. This one was struck ("НГ" for mintmaster Nicolai Grachev) at St. Petersburg:

Bulk lotting can be controversial. How do you like these bulk lots?

Duplicate post.

Good catch, Valentin! Azərbaycan Respublikası = Republic of Azerbaijan Coin identification

Valentin, welcome to CoinPeople!

Krause listed only the 2 coins I mentioned, for the two Tibet expeditions. It might be that these are the only ones that they have seen or whose existence they have confirmed. They made no attempt to estimate prices for them: maybe there was no record of sale they could locate or there were too few recorded sales to try to come up with a price. Maybe the Krause people don't know about it or have never seen one before. I know I certainly haven't. Why not email them your pictures posted here, or send them an email with a link to this thread? That sounds reasonable to me. Maybe they were concerned that these might be sold as the real thing to the unsuspecting. I don't know. I think PCGS is generally preferred for US coins and NGC for world coins. Both would likely use outside consultants for unfamiliar items (maybe even the same people?). Maybe it comes down to whichever company charges less and/or returns your coins to you more quickly. In 1992, the Soviet Union had just recently collapsed and the situation within Russia itself was probably not very stable. Scottishmoney has spoken of widespread economic hardship about that time. It's probably fair to say that the average person was more worried about paying the rent and feeding the family than about coin collecting. In such a situation, it seems reasonable to believe that mint officials might have concluded that selling expensive gold coins to collectors would prove very difficult or unsuccessful. I don't know if they could count on foreign sales to any significant degree. Certainly their previous experience with the Moscow Olympics had not been a huge success and I wonder whether they had any foreign partner or distribution channel in the West willing to take the financial risk of marketing such a coin at the time. So a decision to drop the gold coin and proceed with a much less expensive silver issue might have made good sense to them at the time from a marketing perspective. *Edited to add that I just had a look through Rylov & Sobolin searching for the 1993 Spitzbergen coins. I didn't see any, however I did find some 1992 100 rubles gold and 150 rubles platinum coins listed for 1992. There goes my "the coin would be too expensive" theory.

gx, I think I might have found something that will be of great interest to you. I was browsing through a copy of the 2006 Krause (33rd ed) of 20th century coins at my local library (I don't use this catalog and so don't have my own copy). I found something very interesting. On page 1832, I found listings for 2 uniface "bank display model" coins featuring these designs: and Instead of the normal eagle that is found on these silver coins, the bank models were smooth with the word "МУЛЯЖ" ("model") in large incused letters. Now here's where it gets really interesting. The models were described as weighing only 15.22g each (the silver coins weigh 34.73g) with a specific gravity of 9.280 with REEDED edge! Also the diameter was given as 38.77mm which is almost an exact match for the 39.00 (±0.30) specification given on the www.cbr.ru website (see HERE and HERE). The model coins were described as being a lead-tin alloy and proofs. They were listed as 1999(m) which I think means "Moscow" because I saw other coins listed as "sp" (St Petersburg?) instead of "m". I see some wear on the high points of the angel on yours which looks like base metal under gold plating. Based on all this, I think these "bank display models" were made for banks to show their customers, without having to worry about theft of precious metal coins. I think yours are probably models that were made for a gold coin that for some reason was either never struck or never released. I'm now convinced these are not fantasies.

I think those days are gone forever. No more coins with a population you could count on your fingers & toes for a few hundred bucks.

I think all of us, unless wealthy, are feeling the pinch. Following the link to the UBS auction contained in bobh's post of a few days ago, I was struck by how, for a major European auction, so few truly outstanding Russian coins were being offered. I think the runup in prices from demand within Russia has already resulted in many of the best coins returning to the home country. Unless prices here in the West begin to go even higher, to compete with those being paid in Russia (or else prices paid within Russia begin to fall to Western levels), then I don't think those coins will soon find their way back to the West. Of course, the UBS sale is just one auction and it takes more than one auction to establish a trend.