Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory

Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory is a supplier on Alibaba.com.

The factory's Alibaba page offers fifty different ancient coin types. I have not inspected any of them personally but a coin from the same dies as the one in the photograph above was published in 2007 by a noted Bulgarian scholar as genuine (I think... can't read Bulgarian).

This manufacturer claims to employ over 100 people at a factory at Qiuaid Town Industrial Estate, Yinzhou District, Ningbo City, Zhejiang Province, China. Mr. Ruifang Wang is the contact.

Strangely the site claims to offer the coin in the photo for twenty cents, but with a minumum order of 10000 pieces. I have been wanting this particular fake since 2005 and only three have turned up on the market. If anyone does manage to contact the seller I'd love to purchase some specimens of this particular replica.

According to the seller's Alibaba page, “Quzhou Fake Ancient Coins Factory is established in year 2000. We can make all kinds of fake ancient coins such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Biblical, Byzantine and Persian coins. All these coins are made from zinc alloy or brass material with antique silver or gold plated. We can produce fake coins and also metal gifts or metal souvenirs.”. This is apparently not a clandestine manufacturer, the seller warns “Illegal usage is not allowed. Please leave us alone if you want to use it for cheating.”

The future of money?

The Royal Canandian Mint is proposing a digital currency. A developer is showing some details.

Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter

I have been too busy to post. Mostly learning Ruby, not collecting unfortunately.

Anyway, I wanted to mention Thomas Levenson's Newton and the Counterfeiter. Amazon has the hardcover at $10 and the paperback at $6.

If the historical Isaac Newton had never become mint master the theme of this book would have been ridiculous. A 17th century 'police procedural' with the world's greatest scientist abandoning physics and become a proto-detective in London's underworld is really too silly for fiction. Yet it happened.

The book lacks photographs. Pages and pages are spent discussing hammered coins, why they could be clipped, and how they are different from milled coins. I would have appreciated a few photos but at least I know what the coins look like so it wasn't hard to follow the discussion. Levenson also explains the differences between good and poor quality fakes of hammered and milled coins, and discusses fake currency ('malt tickets'). I have never seen a fake English coins from this period and I've never seen a malt ticket, real or fake; photos of these would have been especially welcome.

I recommend the book highly.

Shutty's One Coin is Never Enough

Michael S. Shutty Jr., One Coin is Never Enough. Paperback, 251 pages, $25.

In this book Shutty discusses his collecting practices (Buffalo nickels and large cents). Shutty is a psychologist and he explains various experts' psychological theories of collecting. He is fond of breaking the collecting experience into the various categories used by psychologists, producing transition diagrams such as one which purport to show collectors cycling from "Courtship" to "Hunting" to "Acquisition" to "Integration" and later to a post-collecting "Displacement" phase.

I was hoping for stories of great successful and unsuccessful collectors modeled after Nicholas A. Basbanes' descriptions of book collectors in A Gentle Madness. These are not to be found; Shutty almost exclusively discusses himself and his personal collection. Even when discussing Sheldon large cent varieties Shutty doesn't reveal that Sheldon's coin addiction left behind a trail of thefts that destroyed the legacy of the once-respected psychology professor -- a story so delicious I couldn't resist linking to it in this micro review.

I felt like Shutty spent a lot of time explaining coin collecting, perhaps targeting his explanations to his psychologist colleagues.

The first 14 chapters use examples exclusively from American coin collecting. World coin collecting is given a chapter. Ancient coins are not discussed, nor the collecting of historical medals.

I found the book interesting but not as interesting as a books on coins. I don't know if that says something about me or something about Shutty's book. There is a lot to be said for Shutty's attempts to map aspects of coin collecting upon multiple psychological theories rather than selecting one framework and attempting to pigeonhole all of collecting upon it. Still, sometimes Shutty's explanations seems overly complex.

We collect simply because we like coins more than other people. Even Shutty's favorite example, a Chain Cent slug he paid $1000 for, was purchased because it seemed like a good deal to Shutty. The simplest theory I know to explain why Shutty and I enjoy our coins is that the side-by-side comparisons we do while looking for coins somehow make us vastly more appreciative of them. Psychologist Seth Roberts calls this the Willat effect. Roberts believes connoisseurs are made this way, at least in food and drink domains such as wine via wine tastings. What I've noticed is that the same thing happens visually with coins. What really got me collecting again after a 20 year break was looking at several hundred hemidrachms of Parion over three months on eBay trying to find the most beautiful $50 example. After that I was hooked.

A Greek obol modified in antiquity

This tiny obol of ancient Kelenderis (8.5mm in diameter, 0.77g) has a form of ancient damage that I have not seen before. First, the reverse. There are three raised dots on the wing. I had originally thought they were a decorative and part of the die but now am starting to believe they are a counterstamp or banker's mark (or three counterstamps/marks?). The dots are nearly the same size as the decorative dots bordering the incuse square.

Directly opposite the three dots on the wing is the forehead and right eye which are a bit flattened. I believe it was flattened by the application of the dots.

There are extensive incuse dots within the mouth. It is possible the dots are always within a line of three. There are also clearly a line of dots below the chin on the left side.

A colleague believes there is tooling or bankers marks up in the hair and to the side of the head as well. I am less certain of this, it could just be something with corrosion although the coin is of excellent metal.

A typical example, without the marks, was sold as CNG e-auction 214, lot 203. I am very interested in hearing from other collectors and institutions owning Kelenderis coins carrying similar marks or with other coins from these dies. If any readers wish to inspect the coin in person I'll be at NYINC on Saturday.

"Fighting illicit traffic of cultural property in South-East Europe"

A 16 minute documentary video by Anthony Krause and Matteo Rosati. It was produced by UNESCO's Venice office. Coins are briefly shown being repatriated to Bulgaria (from Canada) at 12:30. Coins are shown being repatriated to Turkey (from Serbia) at 12:50. Coins also appear for a few seconds at 3:30 but are not discussed.

New Unicode 6.0 Money symbols

The Unicode standard has some new currency and banking symbols.

1F4B0 💰 Money Bag
1F4B2 💲 Heavy Dollar Sign
1F4B3 💳 Credit Card
1F4B8 💸 Money with wings (!)
1F4B4 💴 Banknote with Yen Sign
1F4B5 💵 Banknote with Dollar Sign
1F4B6 💶 Banknote with Euro Sign
1F4B7 💷 Banknote with Pound Sign

1F3E6 🏦 Bank
1F3E7 🏧 Automated Teller Machine
1F4B1 💱 Currency Exchange (Glyph can show various coins and notes)
1F4B9 💹 Chart with upwards trend and Yen Sign

I can't see these symbols in my browser because I lack a font that includes them.

The characters were added because they were needed to render the Emoji characters used for emoticons and shopping glyphs on Japanese cell phones, not as an aid to numismatists.

The flying wad of money is my favorite. If anyone knows how this symbol is typically used in Japanese cell phone signage I would love to know! Many of the other Emoji symbols are even stranger: space aliens, Japanese ogres, someone getting a face massage, a cat that's crying, even a “Moon Viewing Ceremony”.

Ilya Prokopov on coin forgery

New introduction to coin forgery by Ilya Prokopov: “The World of Coin Forgery - Part 1”.

Prokopov's books can be purchased from SP-P Publishing House.

The solidus mark

The solidus was a Roman coin but it is also the name for a punctuation symbol that looks exactly like a slash. The Wikipedia article explains that '2 pounds, 10 shillings, and 6 pence' was written as £2 ⁄ 10 ⁄ 6 (as an alternative to '£2 10s. 6d.') and '10 shillings' would often be written as 10 ⁄ -.

The / has the form it does because it is an abbreviation for ∫ “Long S” sometimes known as the integral symbol. It is also called a shilling mark.

So we have a single-stroke symbol that is an textual abbreviation for another single-stroke symbol. The abbreviation has two names, both derived from denominations of coins.

Badly tooled Kushan coin

I usually avoid tooled coins but this Kushan coin is one of my favorites. I really like the three-fingered Santa Claus but not as much as as the goggle-eyed horse rider. I see this piece more as the equivalent of a hobo nickel than as a damaged ancient coin.

NAC auction import guarentee

Many collectors are looking with amazement at the catalog for the upcoming part 1 of the RBW collection. The catalog can be downloaded in three parts from Numismatica Ars Classica.

Numismatica Ars Classica is offering an import guarentee to US customers. This is the first guarentee of this type that I have seen, but I expect such guarentees to be increasingly important. Here is the guarentee:

The RBW Collection is an American collection and all of the coins that make up this collection were outside Italian territory prior to 19th January 2011. Furthermore, almost every item was exported from the United States using a special procedure: Certificate of Registration (CBP Form 4455), which proves American provenance,
therefore none of the coins offered in this sale are subject to any kind of US
import restrictions.

Nonetheless, Numismatica Ars Classica NAC AG endeavours to provide its American clients with the best service possible and we will therefore take it upon ourselves to carry out all of the customs formalities for importation into the USA and will then ship the lots to each individual client from within the United States.

NAC guarantees importation to the US of any coins purchased in this sale.

Blank copies of “Form 4455” can be downloaded from the US Customs web site.

I was previously unaware of this procedure. Has anyone tried it? Could I take my collection to Toronto for a long weekend to prove its provenance for the future?

3D scanning of ancient coins

I recently became aware of a paper on 3D scanning of ancient coins delivered two years ago at the 22nd CIPA Symposium. The paper, by M. Kampel of the Pattern Recognition and Image Processing Group at the Vienna University of Technology along with S. Zambaninia, M. Schlapke, and B. Breuckmann, is available online.

The group scanned 16 ancient Roman coins and 9 medieval coins using a 3D surface scanner. They produced 3d models of the coins that look quite good! I would be curious to know how long it takes to scan a coin.

I have mentioned Martin Kampel's work before. He worked on automatic classification of ancient coins for the European Union's COINS project. This new research was partly paid for by the same European Union grant that underwrote COINs.

I would also be curious to know if a commercial service could scan my collection for a fee. This technology, if commercialized, could benefit collectors who are often obligated for insurance reasons to keep their coins in a safety deposit box at the local bank.

Hilary Clinton's comments at MOU signing

This English-language TV coverage is from New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television.

Illegal export of old coins

In this case, pre-2004 cupronickel 1 peso coins of the Philipines. According to a story in the Manila Standard by Roderick T. dela Cruz, “In 2006 it even discovered that an international syndicate was smuggling out the copper one-peso coins”. The central bank switched to nickel-plated steel.

The purpose of dela Cruz's story is to urge citizens to spend their old coins to relieve the Philipine Central Bank the burden of minting new ones. “The central bank always loses when minting coins with a face value lower than five pesos because the average cost of minting them is two pesos per coin.”

Amazingly, not only is the Philipine Central Bank minting 1 peso coins at an expense of 2 pesos, it is also minting 1, 5, 10, and 25 centavo coins, although one web page suggests the 1 centavo coins cannot be found and the 5 centavo coins are mostly used as decorations. A peso is worth 2.4 US cents; 25 centavos would be 0.6 US cents.

Outrageous shipping and handling fee

One topic that is ever-popular in online discussion groups is outrageous shipping and handling fees. Reuters blogger Felix Salmon recently described a transaction in which the shipping and handling fees alone are expected to be $400,000,00.

Hugo Chávez intends to ship 211 tons of physical gold from London to Caracas Venezuala. The bullion value is $12,300,000,000. Shipping and insurance will not be cheap.

... my gut feeling is that Venezuela would be do well to get away with paying 3.3% of the total value of the gold in total expenses...

Always look at the shipping fees before purchasing, Dictator Chávez.

Prospero Collection

Next year Baldwin's will auction The Prospero Collection. Baldwin's site doesn't yet have the catalog but it does have a 19 page Flash animated brochure featuring many rarities including an Alexander the Great Poros dekadrachm and the unique Abydos gold stater (?) shown here.

If I had time I would “review” the brochure website, which uses a strange Flash viewer with lots of scrolling and zooming. Try it.

Welcome Celator Readers

Welcome readers who are discovering this blog because of Kevin Barry and Zach Beasley's “The Internet Connection” column in The Celator.

Other blogs mentioned were Ancient Coins, Ancient Coin Cleaning and Restoration, and Vox Populi.

I haven't been posting much lately but last month I received Martin Huth's gigantic new book Coinage of the Caravan Kingdoms and hope to blog upon it soon.

Why is the dollar coin unpopular?

The editors of The Economist report on a psychological study by Princeton psychology professors Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer on the percieved value of coins and notes. (The article is 3 years old).

People offered the banknote believed, on average, that they could use it to buy 83 paperclips, 72 napkins or 46 sweets. Those offered the [dollar] coin thought 39 paperclips, 51 napkins or 27 sweets. In other words, the note was believed to be almost twice as valuable as the coin.

The problem with the coin is not it coin-ness, but unfamiliarity — a similar study show people undervaluing the $2 bill.

I would expect this effect to also manifest as countries change their currency, both today and in historical times.

Keyboard with new Rupee symbol

We have previously blogged about the new Rupee symbol.

Indian Express.com reported today that Lenovo India is the first manufacturer with a Rupee-ready keyboard.

New US platinum coin denomination?

Is the mint preparing a new US coin denomination? A law professor at Yale suggests minting two $1,000,000,000,000 coins to cover our national obligations if the debt ceiling is not raised.