A great many households have collections of old coins that they have either inherited or simply forgotten about and packed away. Baldwin’s, home of numismatics since 1872, are urging people to take this time to go through those collections with a view to finding a small piece of history that may be far more valuable than you can possibly imagine.

“Sadly it’s all too common a story,” says MD Neil Paisley. “We are constantly meeting people who tell us about these fantastic collections that were left to them but they either threw them away or sold them at a boot sale for pennies as part of a house clearing exercise”.

It’s hard to believe that these ‘needle-in-a-haystack finds’ are commonplace but as Neil explains, “It certainly isn’t an everyday occurrence but it does still happen. In fact towards the end of last year a couple came into Baldwin’s with two gold coloured 1806 farthings, one British and one Irish, they had kept in the back of an old drawer for as long as they could remember. Initially we thought that they were gilt copper, which aren’t particularly rare but still popular and worth around £400 each. It was only after further examination that it became clear that they were actually gold and as such excessively rare, so much so that our team knew of only one other example before these two. We convinced them to let us prepare the coins for auction where, after an initial valuation of £5000, they sold for £10,000 each. Not bad for something stashed amongst your socks!”

So before you go boxing up your the bric-a-brac in your loft or garage it may be worth scouring through those dusty old boxes, because whilst it’s true that not all that glitters is gold… some of it is.

WEBSITE: www.baldwin.co.uk
CONTACT: coins@baldwin.co.uk / 44 020 7930 6879