While I'm continuing to mull over the fate of the 1875...

In the midst of trying to decide what I want to do with the PCGS-graded 1875 Netherlands 10 Guilden, I found an 1887 for sale on eBay. It's only an MS64 where I mostly like to stick with MS65 or higher but this coin doesn't come up for sale very often in any grade. Only about 40,000 were minted originally and only about 50 have been graded by NGC, and this one was graded by NGC so it works for the registry set. The icing on the cake was that the seller had it listed for $370 -- not a terrible price for a coin that's 130 years old, rare and that has a melt value around $250 at current prices.

Not to be wasteful though I contacted the seller through their website and arranged to buy the coin off eBay and get it for $350.

I was really thrilled to get this coin. It has the second lowest mintage of any coin in the series. The lowest is the 1888 with a mintage of about 35,585 -- but none of the coins from the 1880s are easy to come by and the most common of them have mintages in the range of 50,000. It's an odd set to collect in that respect. The 1875 had a mintage of over 4,000,000. The 1876, 1877, and 1879 have mintages of about 1.5 million, 1 million, and 0.5 million. The 1889 is rare relative to those but still pretty common relative to the rest of the 1880s -- it has a mintage of about 200,000.

If you look at the registry sets for that category they're all made up of sets with coins from the 1870s and the 1889. You don't see any sets with the 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, or 1888. The rarer years just don't show up for the most part. So getting this 1887 feels like a big win.

I'd really love to get an 1877 to at least have all of the common dates but I'd rather have this 1887 MS64 than an 1877 MS66 (40,754 minted vs 1,108,149).

I am also loving the fact that it is another coin in the set (3 so far) that are in old fatty holders with 9 digit serial numbers. That seems to be becoming a trend in this set.

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