Revenant

38 minutes ago, Just Bob said:

It looks like van den Wall Bake made some slight changes in the lettering placement, size, etc. I wonder if this was for aesthetic reasons, or if it was to further differentiate his coins from Taddel's.

Yeah... With things like that, when talking about 130+ year old coins. I'm never quite sure what's a deliberate "change" and what's a normal, year-to-year, die-to-die variation. With modern coins these things can be reproduced with very tight tolerances but I don't know what the tolerances were like back then. While I take those shots and blow it up huge the coin is only about the size of a US nickel. So those are small variations.

1 hour ago, Mohawk said:

Thanks for the update Revenant.  I don't know what to say.....I cannot imagine how hard this is.  It has to be absolutely terrible.  As you know, I'm not religious and I don't pray, but my thoughts and best wishes are still with you and yours all through this, my friend.  If I were in your area of Texas and not just some guy sitting in New York State thousands of miles away, I'd do anything I could to help you and yours through this.  As it stands, all I can do is offer you my best wishes, which I do again, wholeheartedly.

Thanks. I appreciate the sentiment. This is clearly going to suck from start to finish but hopefully he'll pull through.

In Illinois you actually get something that can be called "Winter." In Texas... I don't know what you call this. "Not Summer," maybe.

Point of curiosity: Did you send them into PCGS again or did you send them to NGC? I guess without it specified I'd assume they'd go back to PCGS but I didn't want to assume. I know the general consensus seems to be that if you take any coin from either service that was graded 20+ years ago and send it in you might get at least one grade higher but I've never been brave enough to test it. Sounds like you did okay though.

14 minutes ago, Mohawk said:

Thanks for the update Revenant.  Sorry to hear that Samuel had to be intubated.......you're right, that sucks.  But it'll help him heal....he won't have to work so hard to breathe now, so his body will have its energy for other things.  How's Shandy doing?

She's doing fine. Minor concerns make it sound like she won't be released until Saturday or Sunday instead of today which she's thrilled about. Even if she's released she wants to nap on the couch in the baby's room rather than coming home because she knows she can't travel back and forth much.

1 hour ago, Mk123 said:

what is the gold weight of these 20 francs? About 1/4 oz? You got something with gold value and its old and a neat design compared with modern gold coins

I think it's either 0.185 or 0.19 troy ounces of gold weight. Something like that but I don't know the exact number off the top of my head.

5 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

At your son's age I think that the chances he will continue with collecting are much better than it was with my kids. 

I certainly hope both Ben and Samuel will take an interest in this stuff, but, as I've said several times already in other posts I've made recently, I know going in that they might not. I think getting in early and capturing their imagination by sharing this stuff and talking about it will be important. That's part of why I do some of the research and learn the history the way I do and why I've cultivated in myself the ability to write and talk about this stuff with joy, curiosity, and passion in such a way that that comes across. But in the end it will be what it will be.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out well with your son. It'll be a sad day if your sets go on the block but that's the way all of us and all of our collections have to go eventually (baring destruction by some disaster).

1 hour ago, deposito said:

 I'm surprised even a dude close to my own age, late 30's, is collecting coins, let alone 2 year olds. 

Well, I'm actually only 32, but I agree on the general decline in the study of History in the US, and the decline of the love of knowledge in general. I was introduced to the idea of collecting coins from my grandfather's coins and by my family emphasizing that coins from 1964 and before should be saved because they were special.

53 minutes ago, Mohawk said:

I myself still use mostly cash, but I realize how rare that truly is and I wonder if it would be the case if I didn't collect coins and currency.

I use a credit card that gives cashback for everything and pay it off at the end of the month - I even put my kid's daycare on the card and pay it off. I get a decent amount of cashback this way and I never pay interest, so it works for me.

5 hours ago, Mohawk said:

 When people talk about the hobby being in decline, being an older person's game or something like that, I'd love to show them posts like these.  Our hobby definitely has a future. 

Personally, I think the bigger threat to our hobby / community is the decline of cash, the rise of digital transactions and the specter of a cashless society in the future. People (and kids) these days are increasingly not using cash on a daily basis - I usually go weeks without using cash, months without using coins. I think if we have a generation that doesn't have that visceral connection to coinage you might see the hobby take a huge hit at that point. The other part of this is that most people just don't understand silver and gold as a valuable thing anymore. There are videos on YouTube of a guy offering people a 100 oz silver bar (when silver was at $16/oz), for $100 and he was in front of a coin shop, offering to let them test it to verify that it was real, and no one was willing to buy it from him for 7-8 cents on the dollar because they just didn't know.

4 hours ago, Just Bob said:

Seriously, there will be plenty of time later on to teach him proper care and handling. For now, he is having fun with his "monies," and this is a great time not only for bonding with Dad, but also for teaching a multitude of subjects: addition, subtraction, geometry, balance/center of gravity, and many others. You can teach him how to spin them, stack them, and flip them.You can let him pretend to buy something from your "store,"and teach him to make change. The possibilities are limitless. Have fun while he is still young. They grow up WAY to quickly.

Yup. Hard to believe some days that he's almost three and about 3.5 feet tall. And, yeah, those buffalo rounds were the sacrificial lambs. They're scratched and beat quite well at this point. When he's not around sometimes I just sit at my desk and mess with them too, let myself feel them and hear them chink together.

2 hours ago, ColonialCoinsUK said:

Great idea! He will remember that forever.

I bought my kids some kilo bulk lots of world coins at auction and a world map to go on the wall. They spent many many hours trying to match coins to the countries, and sticking them on the map, it was a great way for them to learn where each country was although places like 'Sarawak' caused some confusion as they no longer exist.  Unlike your son it was the ones with animals on or funny shapes that they were most interested in and it also meant that they got some funny looks on holidays when they wanted to know why it wasn't Pesetas in Spain, Lira in Italy and Marks in Germany - however this did then prompt them to start looking for the different countries on the euros. They still go through their change trying to put date sets together and looking for the special 50 pence pieces we have here in the UK so I guess something sank in over the years!

Yeah, most of that and some of the things that Bob was talking about are still a bit beyond him but he'll work up to it. I actually ended up bringing home some of those circulating commemorative 50 pence coins with me when I visited Scotland in late 2017 with my wife. I have a bunch of coins from various countries as I've noted in journals before, but some of those come down to me from my grandfather and, valuable or not, he won't be getting those to play with for quite a while.

11 minutes ago, thisistheshow said:

That sounds and looks like fun. I started collecting when my kids were no longer toddlers with that curiosity. If I had started earlier, no doubt I would be doing the same. 

How old are yours now then? Have they hit the teenage years where-in you're no longer interesting or cool?

49 minutes ago, jgenn said:

I now have the envelop and it does not use the term "pistareen" so I now know it was the cataloger who used that less than appropriate description.

Glad it worked out for you.

2 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

It's not as difficult as you imagine. When I edit a picture I resize all my pictures to 800x800 pixels. This works pretty good for any application I want to use my pictures. As is the case with all my cropped pictures they all start bigger than 800x800 pixels so I am never taking a lower sized picture and making it larger. Now I happened to use the Peace Dollar at 38.1mm in my collage as a reference. Not many of the pieces in the collage are much bigger than the Peace Dollar except the 1876 centennial medal at 55mm. Therefore, knowing the diameter of all the other coins and using the Peace Dollar as a reference I resized them as a percentage of the Peace Dollar. Using Photoshop Elements as my editor each of the coins were their own layer on a larger matte. I then moved each layer independent of the rest into the collage you see. Merging the layers and resizing the collage to a manageable size finished the picture. 

You say all that like it's this simple, easy thing, but making that image was still a lot of work and some people in this world act like they're allergic to math.

I remember thinking at the time I saw your original comment that it could have been and probably should have been it's own journal entry. I'm glad to see you flushed out the concept and let it stand alone.

19 hours ago, jgenn said:

Thanks for the informative post!  I'm a fan of secular imagery, myself.

I am too, but this thing makes it interesting in that how you see it / what you understand it to mean is going to vary heavily on your background and how much of the history you know.

I think the best you're going to be able to ever hope for with NGC / a third party grader is for them to incorporate a method into the registry or something similar that lets you build in provenance information that can travel with the coin as it travels through time from one registry user to another. The grading company is not going to want to be involved in saying this information is legit or not - especially if this is perceived to increase the value of the item and create financial liability in the process. I also don't see them investing the time / manpower / human resources for such an effort without financial incentive - which might turn into paying them every time the coin changes hands and you want them to verify and add something to this provenance. That might be enough incentive to overcome the reluctance to accept the liability, but it's just going to turn into one more costs of owning / collecting and people will only do it with truly rare coins or truly famous coins / collections - the kind you establish provenance on anyway.

One thing you might look into is that the coin details has a tab now called "Purchase/Sale" that I think only the owner can see that lets you list when it was bought, who it was bought from, what you paid, and add notes.

6 hours ago, Just Bob said:

By the way, you have quite a handsome son, and a very lovely wife, and she sounds like she is a real catch. I hope the pregnancy continues to go well.

Thanks. I think they're both great too.

3 hours ago, coin928 said:

Just FYI, the website PennyCollector.com is dedicated to elongated cents.  It also has a location page that lists the location of elongated cent presses all over the world, including the machines at the Houston Zoo .  I haven't checked, but it looks like most, if not all, have photos of the elongated cents you can make there.

There is also an Elongated Cent Collectors club.  I'm pretty sure those are the folks that give away the free samples at the ANA shows that Gary mentioned above.

Interesting! Good to know. I never realized it was such a big thing for some people.

27 minutes ago, rons said:

What a great way to remember a visit. They make little notebooks to store the pennies and I have almost  filled my second book already  What fun

I know! I've seen those too and I was telling my wife and mother-in-law about them and saying we should get Ben a book for his. I don't think I'd ever be able to find it if I tried but I remember getting one of these with the San Jacinto monument on it when I visited the site as a kid and another one with a space shuttle when I went to NASA once.

9 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

Elongated cents are a cool way to introduce your son to numismatics! I like your wife's idea of getting your son a new cent if you go to the zoo on a regular or semi-regular basis. Like your son I think that the elongated cent with the Komodo dragon is really neat. I usually end up picking one of these cents up for free at coins shows. I really enjoy the family aspects of your posts and the wonderful pictures of your family. Every week of your wife's pregnancy is better than the last

 

Thanks! I'm glad you enjoy them. There will be more to come. They give those away to you for free at coin shows? One of these days I'll get to hit up more shows.

9 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

As she moved into the third trimester on bed rest the bleeding stopped and my son was born at full term naturally.

Even if things go as well as they possibly can, and even if you define "full-term" generously at 37 weeks, there is zero chance of a full term birth or a natural birth in our case.

57 minutes ago, gherrmann44 said:

When I put together my macro set-up years ago I bought a Nikon D3100. A year or so back I perused the cameras at Best Buy to see if it was in my best interest to upgrade my camera. What I discovered was that there were not all that many features in the new cameras to make the upgrade plausible. Of course there is no upgrade for the lens I use. I use an f4 enlarger lens at the end of a bellows mount with a couple of adapter rings to take my pictures . All I need for the camera is an SLR with a manual setting to take my pictures. At 18.6 megapixels I really have all that I will ever need for this application.    

I'm pretty much right there with you. I picked up my Nikon D600/D610 4-5 years ago because I wanted to move up to a full-frame 35mm equivalent for my portrait photography. But at 24.1 MP, I can't imagine anything forcing me to upgrade my camera bodies again until these just out-right die. Even if I somehow manage to run through the 150,000 exposure useful life of the shutter, I can pay $200 to get a new shutter assembly put in, which is far cheaper than a new camera. Some of the lenses I have do have upgrades / are not the newest versions anymore - my 24-70 and my 70-200 mm in particular, but those lenses are both fantastic and easily suit my needs, so there's just no way I'm going to buy new versions of those unless something happens to the ones I have.

Great to see you post again, Gary.

The gold price has been relatively low and I have benefitted from that myself with getting my 1887, 1888, and 1877 10Gs and now a couple of French coins.(well, it will go from being 1 to a couple in a about 2 weeks anyway).

Personally I find that some hobbies require a pretty big upfront investment, but then don't necessarily require much to keep them going. I've spent over $10,000 on my cameras and lenses, but that was spent years ago. I haven't made a lens or other major purchase for photo gear in 3 years. I just keep using what I have because it works. I just chew through AA batteries sometimes.

Hopefully the coin photography will prove rewarding for you and expose you to some things you haven't seen before.

England and it's monarchy are interesting in that, they're among the very few countries in Europe that still has a royal family and it wasn't wiped out, but the monarchy survived by giving up a lot of power and in a lot of ways getting leashed by the parliament. It's funny to think that in the 16th century you already had a parliament passing restrictions on and dictating terms to the royals - more than 125 years before The Bloodless Revolution and more than 220 years before the American Revolution..

15 hours ago, Mohawk said:

Another great entry Revenant!  Keep them coming. 

Thanks, Tom. There's 2-3 more in the pipeline / in my head. I just try to space them out at least a little.

15 hours ago, Mohawk said:

And Jack, may I compliment you on a very beautiful coin!  Thanks for sharing that one with us!

Yup. That late-18th century piece actually has a lot of the inscriptions I reference in the post that don't show up in the later 19th century 20 and 100 Franc gold coins. Very neat. I may have to track one of those down one of these days.

18 hours ago, gherrmann44 said:

On that one, I have to say, you put some wear on that  coin so that the details on the feet are less clear and I could totally see somebody getting the wrong idea there.

1 hour ago, Jack Robinson11 said:

Really nice piece of history.....   Only to point out a typo.... check the date that you mention as to when Dupre was appointed as an engraver.... I look forward finding out the meaning of the Roster.... Best wishes

Ah, man. Gotta love those trans-positional errors.