Revenant

In looking at that 1880 10G coin I picked up a couple of weeks ago now one thing kind of stood out to me. There’s something on the left side of the Obverse that looks a lot like a die crack that runs between the K and one of the stars. Unlike a lot of the things you see people posting about in the Newbie forum you can actually see this with a naked eye and I think it really is a die crack and not a scratch - but I could be wrong. Looking closer under high magnification it looks like there may be some additional small cracks around the K. Funny aside, but I commented on seeing this to my wife and she was asking if this made me unhappy or made me like the coin less. Not at all as it happens, but it’s very interesting to me. Seeing this got me thinking about the topic of die pairings - you hear people talk about die pairings and die varieties with other series that have been studied extensively but you don’t really hear about it with this set / series. It occurred to me that this might be attributable to the fact that this series isn’t heavily “collected” by all indications and they’re mostly treated like bullion. Then another thought occurred to me: Are there actually die pairings to research with these coins? The annual mintages for this series are as follows: 1875: 4,110,000 1876: 1,581,106 1877: 1,108,049 1879: 581,036 1880: 50,100 1885: 67,095 1886: 51,141 1887: 40,754 1888: 35,585 1889: 204,691 Die life is a highly variable thing and depends on the size of the coin, the material of the coin and the time period in which it was produced. The mere existence of the 1879/7 variety shows that they weren’t making the 581,000 coins struck in 1879 from a single pair of dies. However, from what I can find with a little looking, it seems like in the 1880s, for a small gold coin, a die life of 50,000 or more would have been very reasonable and achievable. This means it’s possible and maybe even likely that all the coins in this series from 1880, 1885, 1886, 1887, and 1888 were all struck from a single pair of dies and that there are no dies to look at. It seems obvious to think about this now, but it’d never occurred to me before. If that’s true, and if I’m right about this being a die crack, that suggests that, if you could get and look at enough examples, you might be able to look at the progression of that crack over the course of the run and you could distinguish coins from early or late in the production run for 1880 based on the state / presence / absence of this crack. Trying to track down more examples and test this out might be fun in 30 years when I’ve made my millions.

It is Day 13 of our Coronavirus Self-solation. Frequent walks help make it not so bad with the stir craziness now. We’re taking the cars for short drives and driving out to the woods to walk around so that the cars don’t sit idle for too long. I thought it was a good day to have a bit of fun. A few years ago I ended up with two graded 1883-O Morgans in my collection. One is an NGC MS63 that I bought. One is a PCGS graded AU58 that another member here gave me when I bought a coin off them in the marketplace and it took a long time for them to get it in the mail so they sent me that AU58 too just to be nice. I’ve often thought about cracking that AU58 out of the slab because… it’s a circulated common-date Morgan. It’s not like the slab increases the value any and if I crack it out it can go in an album page and take up less room. Anyway. I decided today was the day. I was going to ask Ben to ‘help’ me and we were going to go for it. The nice thing about making a PCGS graded coin the victim is that it helps keep him from thinking he can take a hammer to the NGC coins... I hope. The thing is… I’ve always heard people talk about how easy it is to crack these slabs open and how it just takes a ‘couple of quick taps’ and yadda yadda. Except… We couldn’t get it open. And we hit that sucker hard a few times, on the edge and on the face. It didn’t break. It wasn't just the four year old hitting it! I hit it too! It suffered some clear physical damage, but it’s still together. This result in a number of ways makes sense to me. I was always confused by all the stories about how easy these are to break. It didn't make sense for something made for archival protection to be so easy to break - especially given the likelihood of drops. Still, I'm having trouble reconciling the stories I've heard with this experience. The children's show on the TV is called "Word Party." Ben loves it... I'm not sure why. This has honestly given me some new respect for the slabs. I have that thing a couple of pretty solid whacks on the edge. I would not have expected it to hold up that well. I’ve dropped these things on the floor a few times and nearly had a heart attach worrying they’d break because of what I’ve heard. But this? Wow. So… what am I missing here? Is there supposed to be a mystery-just-right way to ‘tap’ these open?

For months now I’ve been crossing my fingers hoping that I’d get a nice bonus and we’d be able to pay off my student loans and maybe finish paying for the cruise we’re wanting to take in October. I’m still waiting to find out about if I’ll get a bonus this year, but we just got a big surprise on our Taxes. Because we can claim an extra dependent this year and a couple of other things this year, instead of owing money we’re going to get some back and this is going to let us pay off my loans, pay off the cruise and have a little left over. We may be able to use that to eliminate one other debt and, if we can, that’d be three big bills / debts off our plate. I have to wait until the money comes in and we can’t file until we get one last form, but my student loans are as good as dead - 6 years early. My reward for paying 2.5 times the normal payment every month that I could afford it. “PIF by borrower” are wonderful words. … Now to start working harder on her student loans. That… will take a while and be fun. Hey, maybe, if I do get a bonus, I really will get to treat myself a little! As it happens, just in the last couple of days, an NGC graded 1880 10G coin has come up for sale in an old fatty holder with a 1959XX serial number. I’d be a perfect addition to my set but the seller’s asking price is a bit steep. If I get a good bonus, I may try to make an offer and see if they’ll take something more reasonable for it. If I don’t get a bonus and it’s still available in a few weeks I may just negotiate a deal with my wife, just like I did when I got the 1888 in early 2018. If it’s still available when I’m ready to buy, I’ll be really excited to get that coin. But getting rid of these bills will feel great. I do sometimes question if I’d be better served to have put even more towards the bills and less than I currently do to the coins and the hobbies, but this is my fun, this is how I treat myself, and there are worse ways I could do it. Yup... I'm probably going to have a hard time using most of that grading credit if I keep going for things that are already graded.

Apparently this is a thing that exists. Now in its 2nd edition.

A few months ago I talked to another collector who recalled a conversation where-in he and someone else agreed that, if they had tried to build their collections today, buying graded coins and not ones they “discovered” themselves, they never could have afforded to build their collections because prices have gone up so much. I can’t help but think of that statement periodically and ask myself, “So do we really want the value / price of these things to go up?” Or, stated more usefully, “Do I?” The answer to the first question is always “it depends” - and this is true whether I ask it of coin collectors or silver stackers - like at the r/silverbugs subreddit. People who are accumulating / building (usually younger) want prices lower (or, at least stable, no one wants to feel like they lost money really). People that are selling or looking to sell soon (usually older, possibly who viewed their collections as part of their retirement savings) tend to want prices higher or rising. But personally, I don’t know that I care fore the idea of rising prices. I don’t know that I care if the value of my 10G set and some similar projects ever rises. Part of this is that I don’t view my collection as an investment - certainly not solely as an investment. I have a budget for “fun” / my entertainment and the coins are bought out of that. The 401K is funded completely as its own thing. I want to keep building my collection into my old age. Yeah, I like the idea that there’s some gold / silver value in a coin and that helps provide somewhat of a floor whereby I wouldn’t have to sell the thing for 10 cents on the dollar of what I paid for it hopefully… but I’m hoping to not sell. My most important projects are things that I’m hoping to pass on to my sons upon my death. So, value at resale is something I hope to never worry about. Meanwhile, lower prices mean I get to keep collecting. I do definitely hope I don’t take too much of a loss on some of these coins if I have to sell, but I know that I almost certainly will take some kind of small loss on them unless gold goes up meaningfully. Why? Because I’m one of the few that collects some of these as coins and doesn’t treat them mostly as bullion.

I was looking around at pop-culture news on the internet recently as I sometimes like to do, as nerds like me sometimes like to do, and I found an article saying that there’s going to be a Funko Pops movie - it’s going to try to piggy-back on the success of the Lego movies. This has me in the mood to rant a bit. So this is me being my best “super-judger,” as my wife would put it – anyone reading this is forewarned now. It has been interesting to me that Lego sets have become collectable in recent years and that some of them have appreciated in value quite significantly - to the point that I’m now starting to see articles talking about them as “investments” and that economists have been doing complete studies and publishing papers about the returns they’ve realized. I think the whole thing is a ridiculous and insane bubble that is going to pop and leave some people in tears… but I’m getting off topic. I like / love comics and comic characters and love watching the superhero movies - much to my wife’s chagrin - but I have not and likely will not ever buy one of these little Funko Pop figures, with their odd, cutesy, chibi-style artwork, that retail for about $8-15 each most of the time. I just see them as mas-produced plastic garbage, the likes of which we already have entirely too much of in the world already. My brother-in-law does not share my view on this. He collects them, quite avidly. I’ve never been inside this room in their house and I’ve never witnessed it, but supposedly he has an entire room in their house full of boxes of these things. He has so many he has to store them in the boxes, and he can’t even pull them out and display them properly in a way that he might get some kind of enjoyment out of owning them. I find it vaguely insane. One of the biggest head scratchers for me is that these things occupy a room in his house and my sister lets him get away with this. I think my wife would murder me if we had a room in our house that couldn’t even be used because I was using it just to store my collectables. The smallest room in our home serves multiple functions as an in-home office for me while also being the place where I store photography equipment, coins, coin books, gaming books, and we even keep a twin guest bed in there on top of it all. At Christmas last year (2018) we got into a discussion about them and he claimed that some of them, some of the ones he has, can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars. I think that if someone will actually give him that much for some of them, he should sell them now while the money is good and my sister agrees, but what do we know? I did some research after that conversation and found that there are a handful that collectors of these figures will pay $500 to up to $2,000 for, but these are almost all special, convention exclusive variants with limited productions of 500 or less. I didn’t see any of the off-the-shelf ones that he’s always asking for for Christmas on that list. To me, these things are a fad. They’re not at all unlike beanie-babies, baseball cards, comics or anything else. They’re popular and new right now, you’re going to see some crazy prices for a while, but, eventually, those prices are going to pop, and they’ll probably never see those high prices again. I think this movie is going to help build-up, hype up and extend the life of that bubble, but, in the long-term, I see these things going the way of the do-do. I wouldn’t want to be collecting them and left holding the bag when that happens. Don’t get me wrong - I know coin collecting has had its booms and busts over the decades as well and that’s something we all have to watch out for. However, I think those booms and busts in the modern context of coin collecting tend to be more contained to smaller sections of the broader market, in areas that I don’t currently participate in. I don’t think there’s a bubble in the 19th and 20th century European gold coins I’ve been buying for about 20-50% over the spot price of gold. I think we might one day see a crash in the values achieved by modern condition rarities, but I think that’s going to be a problem for people that collect those condition rarities. I guess we’ll see if I’m ever proven wrong there. My brother-in-law compared his collection of these toys to my coin collecting at one point. Call me biased, but, no. These made-to-be-collected toys will never be the same as 18th, 19th, and early 20th century coinage. They don’t have the artistry. They don’t have the history. It’s also odd to me though that he feels that his collecting experience is similar to mine. I don’t know if he spends time researching his collection beyond mere price-discovery activities, but it’s hard for me to imagine that there’s much to look into or research there (again, maybe this is my bias showing). But I spend a lot of time with my collection. I spend a lot of time researching it, reading about it, taking pictures of the coins and notes, writing about them here and elsewhere. His Funko Pops sit in boxes.

I wanted to share a bit of new vs old photo results. Both the coin images are of the obverse of the 1876. I set up my equipment the same way I usually do for macro photography of miniatures and other really small objects. I have a 105 mm f/2.8 VR Macro lens for my D600 and I added the 2x teleconverter so I could shoot really close in to the coin - having the coin fill most of the frame for really high resolution images - while still staying far enough back that I didn't get in the way of my light. I set up 2 speedlites. I initially was going to use both and have them behind the diffusion panels of the shadowbox but that was killing the luster in the images. I ended up just using one speedlite with a 1/128th full power setting undiffused. That gave me the results I liked the best. Using a small LED flash light to shine a little light on the coin made it much easier to autofocus with the lens. It's fairly dark in the shadowbox and the 2x teleconverter limits the effective aperture of the lens, making it hard to get enough light in for the autofocus to succeed without a little help. The circle of light projected by the flashlight also made it easier to keep the coins positioned consistently when swapping them out. Since the light from the small flashlight is so week it doesn't significantly impact the final image - the much more powerful speedlite dominates in the 1/100 of a second in which the image is taken. Hopefully writing all of this down here will give me something to reference and help me remember later when I want to do this again. I'm including a picture of the set-up on the floor of the room I use as a home-office for now. I suppose it might be easier to do these things if I just set all of this up on a table and didn't force myself to flatten myself out on my stomach on the ground but... hey, I'm still fairly young (31) and don't have trouble getting back up... yet. I was able to basically stand the slabs on their edge with them leaning ever so slightly back on the back of the shadowbox in some cases. I think the new shots have much better detail, especially in his hair, beard and the field of the coin. They also look a lot sharper overall. I'm not sure how this compares to how most others do it. Most of my camera equipment - except for the macro lens itself - was purchased for portrait and event photography and I generally find myself putting the same equipment to use here. I'd love to get a really nice lens-mounted ring-flash one of these days. I think that would provide the best and easiest lighting for something like this. But so far I just haven't been able to justify the cost.

Go into the auction already knowing what you'll pay. I realized that I tended to go nuts on auctions pretty early on and I've subsequently found 1 way to prevent over bidding. I look at the item and decide well in advance what I'm willing to pay. (Note: That's what I'm willing to pay, not what any price guide says it's worth though I may consult the book.) In the heat of the moment I'll sometimes go 1 or 2 dollars over, but not more than that. Yes, I'll moan and groan went it's something that I want really bad but I'll usually remember that set price and stick to it... no matter how much I don't like it at the time. I almost never regret it later whether I won or lost. Oh, and I'm a college student so you know my collecting budget isn't huge.

Are only mint state coins worth grading? Or do coins become worth grading once they reach a certain set value? Unlike many of you, I'm barely launched on this journey. I've been trying to learn as much as I could over the last year but there's one question I've been running into increasingly often. When is a coin worth grading? Obviously the modern coins are only really worth grading if a high MS grade can be obtained but what about older coins? Do they necessarily have to be MS and worth hundreds or thousands of dollars to be worth grading or can lesser coins be worth getting slabbed and graded. I'm 20, almost 21. I don't really get to spend $100+ to buy a single coin very often so most of the older coins I have aren't exactly mint state, but some of them are still pretty darn nice if you ask me (maybe my standards are too low?). For now my small but growing Silver American Eagle collection remains my only group of graded coins. I'm reluctant to even consider submitting coins for grading unless I'm reasonably sure it'd be worth the money and effort. Gig'em! (I'm a Texas Aggie)