Owner Comments:
S-3852C, Marsh 38A (R5 - Ultra Rare)
Acquired from: Heritage
Means: Auction 232211, Lot 63507
Date: 16 March 2022
Critique: Very funny story on this coin. Acquired when I was just getting started collecting sovereigns, and didn't have a clue what I was doing. When I examined the giant NGC PhotoVision of the obverse, it really looked to me like there was an overdate in the last number 5. I examined it for a week, and finally convinced myself that this was an undiscovered 1855/4 overdate! Wow! I'll be rich and famous if I can get this coin! So, I bid a bit more than I hoped, but won it. Later, I took more looks at the pix, and realized that some grime around the last 5 had created an optical illusion! In reality this is simply a 5 repunched over an earlier 5 as the dies wore down. Nothing special at all. However, just as I was getting ready to throw the coin in the trashcan, my new copy of Michael Marsh's book "The Gold Sovereign" arrived in the mail, and I found to my great shock that this particular "W W Raised" variety of 1855 is insanely rare, with less than 20 examples estimated to exist. As my dear mom used to say, "sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart."
On another subject, I don't actually own an 1855 Incused variety of this date, but I see that it gets the same competition score in every grade as the Raised variety. The Incused variety had an extremely large mintage for the times of over 8 million coins, and Marsh lists examples as Common vs. less than 20 examples estimated to exist for the Raised variety. How on earth did the NGC judges come up with such a ridiculous scoring? For example, the very expensive 1879 sov is listed in Marsh as only R3 rarity, and quite a few more examples of that coin are in the NGC census than the 1855 Raised, yet 1879 receives a much higher score. Somebody at NGC needs to buy those guys a copy of Michael Marsh's book and ask them to reconsider many of the really unfair scores that they've assigned, based on who-knows-what logic. Just my personal opinion!