Morton & Eden are to sell some U.S. coins from the Royal Mint collection. It's ultra rare for the Royal Mint Museum to sell anything from its collection, but this is to fund further purchases.

Morton & Eden have great pleasure in announcing the sale of important US Proof coins which have remained in the collection of the Royal Mint Museum since their acquisition in 1859.

Originally presented by Professor J.H. Alexander of Baltimore as a double-set from the Eagle to the Cent, the coins were displayed for many years at the Royal Mint on Tower Hill in London and are listed in W.J. Hocking's 1906 catalogue of the collection.

After careful consideration by the Museum's Trustees, the decision has been taken to deaccession one of the two sets (with the exception of the $3, where only one specimen from the original pair has survived). The resources generated by the sale will help fund future acquisitions for the Museum's collection, now housed at the Royal Mint's present home at Llantrisant in South Wales.

The 1859 presentation marked Professor Alexander's enthusiastic lobbying for a new British-American Coinage Union, one of a number of proposals to emerge from debates on decimalization and international coinage which took place in various European locations in the late 1850s and which were, as it turned out, ahead of their time.