is when it's time to sell...

When the dust settled after the Goldberg auction earlier this week, I had not spent too much money. So of course I had to remedy that situation. I had in mind several coins in the current Heritage auction. There was an AU 1823 cent (out of my range, but hey, I can dream), a few MS67 Walkers (one will be the subject of another journal), and some half dimes.

Among the old silver five cent pieces that hadn't already been bid beyond my current ability to pay, were an 1830 MS65PL, an 1841 MS67, and an 1862 PR67Cam. They were up for sale last night. The 1830 just didn't speak to me enough, due to a couple scratches apparent in the photos, so I let it go without a bid. The 1841 would break my pattern of only 66s in my MS Seated Liberty set, but I have to face the fact that I'm not going to get a lot of them that nice. But 67 is a favorable departure from the existing trend. When the lot came up, I clicked the bid button immediately, but was beaten by a prior book bid. Without thinking to enter a cut bid, I clicked the bid button again and won the lot. The 1862 went unsold, and is tempting me, but I really can't afford any more right now.

After that, I started entering info about my new purchase into my collection spreadsheet. And because Heritage provides slab photos, I could enter the coin in the registry immediately also. When I tried, I got a message that it was still in another member's set. So I decided to see which set that was.

I found it in the #3 ranking set. That set was complete (except for the unique 1870-S, of course), but I was surprised to see that the 1841 was the single highest graded coin in that set. Having completed that search, I went back to Control Panel and noticed that my points and rank had improved, so I immediately went back to the set rankings page to find that the former owner had not only already released the 1841, but had deleted the whole set. So I had gotten the last look at it. Looking at the Heritage catalog, it appears that he had indeed sold the entire collection.

Over the past several years I have sold a number of my coins after purchasing upgrades. My goal had always been to build a quality collection of large cents, rather than one of those great variety & die state collections about which I've written. So parting with most of the upgraded coins has not been a problem for me. But at this point in my collecting journey, I can't even think about parting with my top coins, and certainly not selling off a whole set.

I know many people will build a set, sell it, and start building another. But with the recent big copper sales, I'm faced with the reality of health problems or death leading to the sales of collections. Dr. Bill Duffy's registry bio mentions only his long-time effort in collecting half dimes. His registry presence is now limited to some nice sets of dimes. Whatever his reason for selling, I wish him the best.

Here's the 1841 half dime.