Owner Comments:
Mintage: 1,108,149
This was the 7th coin purchased for the set. I won it in an eBay auction on 12/11/2018. Since it came so close to Christmas (Got it in the mail on 12/18/2018) we put it under the tree. I’m told that my 2 year old son helped wrap it.
In December 2018 I’d managed to save up enough money to buy a small gold coin - I’d been working on this set but also collecting other late 19th and early 20th century European gold coins that were about 0.2 troy ounces. I was really wanting to pick up something like a French Lucky Angel or a British Sovereign and had been for a while, but I was also wanting to get an 1877 for this set, complete my set of common dates for this set, and get this set over 50% complete on the registry. The problem is, there weren’t any 1877 Netherland 10G coins for sale that I could find. I convinced myself to wait, keep the powder dry, and see if one would appear.
An MS64 came up for sale in the first week of December. I was really tempted to snatch it up and fill the hole in the set at long last, but I’ve always tried to keep this set MS65 and above as much as possible, and this coin is common enough in MS65 and MS66 that I just felt like it was better to wait for what I really wanted.
A couple of weeks later, not one, but two, 1877s came up for sale, both graded by NGC. One was an MS65 in an old Fat NGC slab. One was in one of the new, nifty, pretty edge-view holders, graded MS66. Both were auctions and not listed for “Buy it Now”/”Best Offer.” The MS65 was ending 6 days before the MS66. I didn’t need both and I didn’t really want both, even though I joked about it and my wife rolled her eyes at me. I wanted the right coin to help build the set.
The holder was important because three of the six coins already in the set at the time where in old fat slabs with 9-digit 195 or 196 serial numbers. It had become an unofficial theme of the set. As it turned out, this MS65 has an invoice number that’s almost the same as the invoice numbers for the 1876 and 1879 that I have in the set. They were all graded by NGC at roughly the same time about 25 years prior around 1993. I feel like there must be a story there. I’ll probably never know what that story is, but I feel like there must be one.
It’s always drilled into us to “buy the coin and not the holder.” From the pictures provided, the MS66 looked like the nicer coin. The problem is, pictures never tell the whole story and the quality of the pictures can become an issue. The person who photographed the MS66 for the listing knew what they were doing, and you could tell. The pictures of this MS65 were pretty lousy on the whole.
It’s also always drilled into us to buy the highest grade that we can afford and to “invest” in high grades. The MS66 was also the higher graded coin. But the MS66 was in that new edge-view holder. It had probably been graded in the last year or two. It didn’t share the history, the story, with the other two coins already in my set that the MS65 did.
This really had me torn for a few days, but I ultimately ended up buying this MS65. Shortly before the auction ended, I saw an old photo of the six coins already in the set together and it really made me think about the purchase in the context of the set. At the end of the day, I just couldn’t pass up the idea of bringing these three coins together again. Three coins that were graded at almost the exact same time - possibly even by the same collector / dealer - purchased over a period of years from different sellers and brought back together into one set. It just felt right.
Last Rev: 09/2019