Best Of

You can get easily lost when you start collecting British coins. The time frame is huge, the monarchs are endless and there’s no shortage of denominations either.

What I have generally seen by watching members here evolving and fine tuning their collections, is that the vast majority eventually turns to less purchases but of a higher quality.

When I first joined, the resident British milled expert was wybrit, who had a wide variety of coins from Britain of the past two centuries. He was going as back as VICTORIA though, that’s something that he had already cleared out.

Little by little, wybrit decided that it was maybe preferable to drop the higher denominations, from florin to crown and no gold and concentrate mainly on three pence , sixpences and shillings. (Groats were indeed odd in the British monetary system and unpopular). I think that he also dropped the bronze coins or part of them but I am not sure. He had however understood, as much as he must have felt remorse for giving up on a large group of coins that he knew well, that by concentrating on the range of 3D ,6d ,and shilling he could slowly build an incredible super grade DATE set of these three denominations, from VICTORIA to late George V I think, but Victorian minors were his first priority, most of which he bought at much lower prices than what they were worth thanks to his expertise and for locating and buying true little gems raw and for a fraction of their value when slabbed.

At some point, not that long ago, wybrit presented us with a truly superb date set of these three denominations, along with a few more coins to which he was partial, wether it were a beautifully toned Victorian florin or a fully red halfpenny, but the focus was on minor milled silver of the 19th and early 20th century.

He too despised slabbing at first, but he was clever enough to understand how he could profit from it. His collection was sold in one of the monthly Heritage auctions and it was truly a magnificent set, including several top pops, amazingly preserved little coins and without almost any marketing, the sale went well beyond his and I assume Heritage’s expectations. After all, full date sets of such caliber are very rare and the timing couldn’t have been better, since his average MS66-67 average quality per coin, had made a huge spike up from a value point of vue.

And this is just one example. I’ve picked wybrit, not only because he too was in British coins and maybe a little lost when he had first joined the forum and how to tackle coins that he couldn’t afford, but also because it is probably the first time that I see a collection, whose completion at the highest grade level ,was also a factor in the realized prices of his coins, probably an extra premium of 10-15% ,even though it was not sold as a set from one collector to another. And this is very rare.

Or, you choose MacCrimmon’s style, who instead of getting self trapped in date sets with impossible dates to get and a nostalgia and remorse whenever a certain denomination was presented, he chose to amass the absolute crème de la crème on some very important pieces, regardless if they were Victorian crowns or George III farthings. Their common denominator was the highest quality he could get his hands on, and his building and selling of his collection went equally well with wybrit’s.

I don’t know if I made any sense, but participating in this forum alone, will eventually have a serious effect on anybody, almost always for the better.