I'm back from the Fall Whitman Baltimore show (the only show I was able to attend in 2024). I had a great time and was able to catch up with many people in person! I really didn't have a strong plan for the show other than to sell some excess numismatic items, both genuine and not, in order to help fund the next Bad Metal book, and if I happened to purchase pieces for my collection, well that would be icing on the cake. I happily achieved both goals.
Among the new acquisitions to my collection was an 1831 counterfeit CBH Davignon 8-H, now 2 known, and a variety I did not own (I'm still missing 87 hand-made die counterfeit CBH varieties - and if you think you might have something missing from my collection please reach out to sell or trade). I also picked up a couple of upgraded condition pieces in the counterfeit Seated series. Otherwise, acquisitions were light but still better than expected.
I saw a handful of other new varieties, such as a couple Seated dimes, a Barber dime, and maybe a gold piece or two. All told, my spreadsheet of documented contemporary counterfeit die struck U.S. coins is very close to 1,000 (I'll have a year-end blog post with the actual quantity of such varieties in about 45 days).
One of the 3 research areas for my next Bad Metal Silver book is conducting more XRF analysis. I was able to find several companies which rent such equipment and that is how I'm going to get the next batch of pieces analyzed so that I can report more results in the next 2 publications, and have more accurate data for the overall list of all documented varieties.
Between today and tomorrow I'm going to list more pieces in the SHOP section of this website. It will be a mix of silver and gold U.S. denomination counterfeits, including some really great pieces, including the only known (to me) love token made from a counterfeit CBH; I'm really tempted to own that piece!
I think that's pretty much it for now. Let me know if there's something else I should be talking about here but haven't done so.
Cheers,
Winston
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