Quickie, minimalist "newps" post (mostly just pix for now- they'll get their own threads later)

lordmarcovan

Just some activity from the past few months.

New or new-ish additions to the Box of 20, though I have not yet had time to do the Herculean housekeeping necessary to fix all the formatting mess in the B20 master thread (let alone all its subthreads) since the last forum change.

ajaan

I don't remember the off centre Georgie 4. Is that ne?

lordmarcovan

@ajaan said:
I don't remember the off centre Georgie 4. Is that ne?

That is not "ne", nor is it you. LOL

Aside from the fact that my Box of 20 has long "needed" an error coin, that one is special.

It has a story.

I was GIVEN that coin in 1993 by a kind dealer in Hendersonville, NC, when I lived in Asheville. He knew I was heavily into British at the time, and working on a monarch set, and... well... wow. What a guy. I believe his name was James Jones, though someone named Jordan later took over that shop and I have mashed the two together in my memory.

When I hit hard times in 1994 (de facto bankruptcy, divorce, home foreclosure), I had to sell my collection. (Not for the last time, either, as my 2008 layoff would again demonstrate. But I rise anew like a phoenix from the ashes each time.)

Michael ("Aethelred") purchased it from me in the fall of 1994 for $100, which seemed a fair price at the time. (How far the World coin market has evolved since then, thanks to this newfangled thing called "the Internet"!)

Michael sold it sometime just after the millennium, and off into the wilds it went, never to be seen again.

Or so you'd have thought.

Earlier this year, by complete accident or serendipity, I stumbled across it on the Atlas Numismatics website, freshly graded in a new-generation PCGS XF40 slab, Trueviews and all. (It was raw when Michael and I had it, and probably raw until this year.)

Well, I was blown away. But didn't think to start working to buy it. You see, Atlas had it priced at $495 ( a not inconsiderable chunk of change on my budget), and called it a "very rare error", with which I am inclined to agree. I actually forgot about rediscovering it for a few weeks until I visited Michael in Asheville this Halloween. Then I remembered. We looked it up, and we both agreed that I HAD to buy this one back.

And so, after some scraping and selling I did just that- quite recently- just this month.

23 years after I first acquired it and more than a decade after Michael sold it, it is mine again!

Atlas came down to $450 and gave me free shipping. So I got it at a 450% price increase from what I sold it for in '94, but sometimes you have to do these things. Tempus fugit- time marches on, y'know.

asheland

I'm glad you got it back! That's a special coin.

mnemtsas2

That is an amazing story LordM, congratulations on getting it back!

brg5658

All super pieces! Congrats!

laurentyvan

Great story, beautiful coins.

Swampboy

Sweet collection!
I love the Georgie story.

lordmarcovan

Announcement:

I am moving over to CoinTalk full time.

The transition of my "Eclectic Box of 20" collection and its various subthreads is under way.

The new platform here has some much needed improvements, and a few enhancements, but I'm afraid it was just a case of "too little, too late", as far as I am concerned.

Recently I spent twenty or more minutes writing a complex post on the Metal Detecting Forum in my usual detailed if longwinded style, with one image and several hyperlinks, only to be told "your message will appear when it has been approved". It has never appeared, and we all know nobody is reviewing this stuff, so it likely never will. Today I discovered that the forums did save a draft automatically (that at least is a big improvement- I lost a lot of work in the last go-round), but this last little glitch has hammered one of the final nails in the coffin of my 15-year CU involvement. Sure, I could probably sift through my saved draft of that post and find the character or phrase that is causing the issue, fix it, and repost, but I do not have one iota of patience left for the software here. The good old forums got too buggy when they became obsolete, the intermediate version earlier this year proved awful, and while this latest version is OK, it is not up to the standard of CoinTalk.

Furthermore, I find the culture at CoinTalk to be more akin to what we had in the Golden Age of this CU Darkside Forum a decade ago. There are big fish swimming around, but plenty of little guys and everything in between, with few snobby or elitist airs.

I will still check in here periodically, and do some networking and light chitchat and occasional selling, but when I want to post anything of substance or complexity, it will be over there on CT. I just don't like the formatting of this new platform (duly noted improvements notwithstanding), so I'm pretty much done.

I will leave CU to the Litesiders, jump the sadly sinking ship of the declining CU Darkside forum, and swim ashore in the New World. I hope to see you over there. I see dozens of familiar profiles over there already.

Do not get me wrong. I am not the bridge-burning type. If the leaky hulk of the Darkside stays afloat here, I'll still swim out to salvage some stuff and stand on the deck to talk to the last remaining pasengers. I'm not suggesting everybody else leave to the exclusion of this place. I've just considered and selected other options, is all.

See you around.

(Boy, what an awful lot of hot air, huh? Sorry. You know how I can be.)

jonruns

I've really enjoyed reading your posts here...best!!! - Jon

Stork

Well poop. Not that I don't check things out over there too, but it's not 'home' yet.

asheland

I hope you come back a little bit at least.

lordmarcovan

i will. Just gonna avoid posting more complex posts here since I dislike most (not all) of the new formatting options.

At least until I become more acclimated to the new CU. (But even when that happens, I will still like the CT platform much more, which is why I've decided to make a new home there. But old friends are not forgotten, Auld Lang Syne and all that stuff.)

I suppose I have enough hot air to spread around on two different forums. LOL.

lordmarcovan

... and the writeups on these coins will likely end up there rather than here. But I'll probably keep at least the OP of the main Box of 20 index thread here updated. It's just that the links to the individual coins will go to subthreads on CT rather than here.