Sometimes, it's just plain better to be lucky rather than good.

As luck would have it, I found myself at the right place at the right time over the holidays. My wife and I were browsing our usual antique furniture haunt and I started talking to the owner. We know the owner fairly well as his store is one of our favorites for antique furniture and we have done a good bit of business there over the years. Anyway, the guy asks me if I know anything about old coins. I figure he might have found a couple of coins in the drawers of some recent antiques he might have picked up so I say "Yea, I guess I know some but probably not as much as I could or would like to but I'm always learning something new about them and I'm always interested in looking at old coins." He goes on that he ended up with some coins in a recent furniture purchase he had made and since he didn't have a clue about them would I mind taking a look at them to see if there was anything of value like scrap silver or gold. Of course, the words "Scrap Silver" are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. Seeing the potential opportunity to save a couple of old coins from the melting pot, I say sure. Hey, if nothing else I'm thinking I'll buy the coins from him at scrap value and save them that way. The guy asks if I can come back the next day because he didn't keep the coins in his shop. Fortunately, the shop is pretty close to the house so I agreed.

The next day I had some errands to run so on my way home I stopped by the antique shop to see what the guy actually had. He goes into the backroom and comes out with old cosmetic travel case and says "Here you go." Opening it, he proceeds in a combination of trying to tell me everything he has in the case and bombarding me with 10 million questions about everything he has in the case. The only problem with all of this was virtually everything in the case was foreign and I know jack squat about foreign coins. When I finally got to put my eyes on the coins there were probably 300 coins just piled into the case. Well, I agreed to look at them so I took the case and told him to give some time to go through them all. I'll bet I made a pretty picture standing there with my jaw on the ground in amazement at all of those coins just piled into the case. I almost forgot to mention there was a stack of old paper bills in the case as well. I know less about paper than I do about foreign coins. Well, I sure didn't know much about foreign coins but I sure do know how to do the needed research to figure out what a coin is. I've spent the last week plowing through the cache.

I sure am glad this guy just didn't send these coins to the melting pot. In that old case, were coins dating as far back as 1668, a silver 1 Tympf coin from Poland. Most of the coins were from WWII or earlier and from just about every corner of the world with a bunch from countries that don't even exist anymore. I started by doing the only thing that came to mind, separating the coins by country easier said than done in some cases. A couple of the more interesting finds were the coins from the Empire of Great Britain with Queen Victoria on the obverse, a 1744 Liege Bishopic Sede Vacante 1 Laird coin (albeit in AG condition), some colonial Mexico silver coins, German coins from the before the Weimar Republic through the 3rd Reich and a really cool chop marked British Trade Dollar from 1898. I even found a couple of Civil War Tokens and a couple of Confederate bills. The bills seem authentic but I need to have them authenticated this weekend. There is still a stash of coins I've yet to identify mostly because my Chinese, Japanese and Arabic are really rusty.

Like I said earlier, I didn't know jack squat about foreign coins but after a weeklong crash course and about 200 hundred different reference websites at least now I can recognize an incredibly wide variety of foreign coins. I doubt I will ever really work on a significant collection of foreign coins but I now have a new found appreciation for them. After the last week, I doubt I can just blow them off anymore. I've probably gone on too long so I will live you with this picture of the 1898B British Trade Dollar with some really clear and certainly cool chop marks.

Have a great weekend,

Dennis