INTERESTING BULK LOT MEDAL FINDS

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V24 2021 INDEX E-SYLUM ARCHIVE

The E-Sylum: Volume 24, Number 6, February 7, 2021, Article 31

There are still nice finds to be had if one is willing to take a gamble on bulk lots. Here's an excerpt from the story of a collector who made some interesting finds. I like the pictured British Empire Exhibition medal. -Editor

While trawling a certain auction website, I came across a large token collection at the starting price of 99p with £3 postage. There was over 1.5kg and I saw a few items I liked the look of so placed a bid of £5.67, strange bid I know but it has been a lucky for me before. I moved on and didn't give it another thought. About 3 days later a ping when off on my phone and I had won, in the end paying the princely sum of £5.60 +£3 postage. I was happy enough and thought it would be a nice little lot to go through.

There was the normal common pieces like the Bell Fruit Machine tokens and Eurocoins, but also quite a lot of interesting looking bits. First to grab my attention was a beautiful looking 1924 British Trades Exhibition token, one I had been looking for for sometime. Fantastic I thought, that has made the cost worth it right there. A nice little £6 token. Next I saw a Cincinnati Beer token one of the things I had spotted online. So I picked it up and laid it aside. It went on like this for the better part of an hour. Sorting, putting into packets or into my standard machine token album.

So with piles of tokens and other odds and ends still in front of me I moved and knocked the table scattering them all across the floor. So down I went to pick them all up when I spotted something I hadn't seen previously. Staring up at me was a little bronze coin with the Britannia Moneta logo. For anyone who doesn't know this is the logo used by the Royal Mint for their Trial Coins. So I placed it back onto the top and picked up all the other tokens as quickly as I could so I could get back to the little coin.

I picked it up and turned it over and to my astonishment it was the Cincinnati Beer token logo on the other side, the one I had saw earlier. I was over the moon but had never seen anything like this. So onto the web I went. I trawled site after site, page after page and nothing.

So I posted a query up on a few of the online forums, again nothing. It started to look like I was never going to find any information at all about it. So I decided then to go for a different approach and began going through past auctions. It took a while but eventually it came up trumps. Lot 480, 28 September 2005 | Dix Noonan Webb as part of the THE JOANNA TANSLEY COLLECTION OF PATTERNS, PROOFS AND COINING TRIALS.

Described as a : PRESS SET-UP PIECE [in conjunction with Cincinnati Inc], in bronze, Britannia seated right, hand-striking a coin, BRITANNIA MONETA, rev. from Cincinnati's advertising check, IF A CINCINNATI SALESMAN CAN'T MATCH THIS COIN HE'LL BUY YOU A BEER, edge plain, 20.5mm, 4.50g/12h. Extremely fine and extremely rare.