September 2005 Coin Newsletter

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The busy selling period leading up to Coinex has already begun, though the first auction was in Edinburgh, not London. The McIntyre and Macmillan collections of Scottish banknotes were offered to a crowded room of collectors and dealers on Monday 12 September. As with our previous Scottish sales, the auction was a great success, and we were delighted with the total of £321,470.

The other banknotes catalogues and the Coinex catalogue have all been well received and the daily influx of postal and online bids is steadily growing, as are the numbers of viewers. There are many auctions in London and in Europe over the next few weeks and many people are viewing early. We will of course be attending all the major auctions, as well as both days of the Coinex show itself.

Coinex Highlights
As well as an exciting collection of Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian & early Persian coins described earlier on the Spink website, a short summary of some highlights from the foreign section is provided below. Please don't hesitate to contact us to discuss these, or any other sections of this auction.

Countermarked coins of Mexico South America and the Philippines (lots 866-1026)
These coins show the extent to which Spanish silver was traded, the majority of coins being the 8 Reales denomination, or ‘Pieces of Eight’ from popular literature. Long John Silver, eat your heart out! Several coins bear ‘chop marks’: small characters stamped on the coins which were used by Chinese bankers to verify the purity of the silver (lot 880).

For the specialized collector, the selection of countermarked coins of Mexico, South America and the Philippines are of particular interest.

The majority of these coins date from a period of intense political and economic turmoil for the Spanish Empire and Latin America. During the 1810s, 20s and 30s, in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, independence movements led by the likes of Simon Bolivar and San Martin in South America carved new republics out of the former Viceroyalties and provinces of the once mighty overseas Spanish Empire. Control of the abundant silver supplies was crucial in the struggle for autonomy and independence.

The plethora of new issues from the various new states during this period is remarkable (eg lots 881, 923, 946 and 950 above). Rocked by the loss of these extensive territories, the Spanish crown was reduced to countermarking the issues of these new states for use in their own territories, particularly in the Philippines. Trade in South East Asia relied on Latin American silver, and the need to maintain silver supplies to this part of the world was crucial and profitable. Demand necessitated that coins of the new South America states - which often bore countermarks already (see lot 927 – a provisional Peruvian issue countermarked with a Royalist party stamp and then countermarked with the Spanish Crown of and initial of Fernando VII) - were marked with a crude stamp to indicate the silver was good and the coin current.

The countermarking of coins, whilst unusually extensive in the case of the Philippines, was not unprecedented. States such as Britain had been reduced to similar measures in times of shortage of bullion, as we can see in lots 1677-1688. These are Spanish issues which were marked with the counterstamp bearing a very small portrait of George III.

For more information about the Coinex auction, please note that the full online catalogue is available here.

With new catalogues arriving almost daily it almost seems out of place to look ahead to ‘life after Coinex’, but the printer’s deadlines loom and we cannot avoid it. So the October issue of the Numismatic Circular is now on the presses. We have taken account of the crush that is created at the beginning of the month by Coinex and will send the October issue after the show, rather than on the first of the month.

Almost immediately behind that is the deadline for the auctions 30 November and 1 December. On the morning of the first day the collection of English coins formed by the late Ivan Buck will be offered. This will include the very comprehensive run of Groats which formed the basis of his exhaustive study published by Greenlight Publishing in 2000. Mr Buck was well known for his fascination with this series, in particular the Groats of Henry VI, and the auction will provide the specialist collector with an unmissable opportunity. All the Groats will be illustrated in the catalogue, and more details will be available soon.

Among the mixed properties in the sale is an extremely attractive collection of gold coronation medals from most reigns, beginning with the gold medal commemorating the Scottish coronation of Charles I in 1633 and finishing with the large gold medals of the present century.

The second day will be devoted exclusively to the collection of Halfcrowns formed by Colin Adams. This collection is perhaps the most complete of its type in private hands and so inevitably it is full of rarities from every reign. A detailed report on this collection will published on the web soon.

Kind regards,

The Coin Department