Owner Comments:
S-3855B, Marsh 82 (Scarce)
Acquired from: Sovereign Rarities
Means: Auction 13, Lot 183
Date: 29 May 2024
Critique: Decent looking example of this common Australian gold sovereign, from the penultimate year of shieldback coinage. Since it's not in a very high grade for this item, normally I would have had no interest in it, however close inspection showed it to have something rather curious that looked appealing.
Under high magnification, all four characters of the date seem to show small numerals over much larger ones. This is the typical appearance of a re-punch, where the first character punched into the die appears to be floating on top of the latter character punched. But in this case, I was a bit concerned that maybe these odd-looking items were really just single punches of numerals that had been engraved in an unusual way, possibly to make them last longer under extreme pressure during minting. Having a wider base under a tapering top might make sense if that was the intention. I considered this dilemma for quite a while, but finally concluded that this truly is an overpunch since the smaller numerals are not perfectly centered over the larger ones. Instead, the smaller ones are positioned higher up towards the center of the coin than the larger ones, which are closer to the rim. I don't think an engraver would produce anything so badly off-center when carving single characters. So my conclusion is that this is indeed a case of a complete date overpunch of large over small numerals, most likely intended to extend useful die life.
A quick review of the top 50 sets in the Victoria Aussie category seems to indicate that this is not a very popular coin with collectors. Only a few sets include one, and none of those are graded higher than MS62. People looking for a nice type coin for a collection would certainly have no interest in this one.
Since this coin is not rare or particularly high grade, as expected there was absolutely no interest in it during the auction and I was able to win it for the minimum starting bid set by the auction company. With the Buyer's Extortion added on the final price was only US$100 over melt. So I ended up with a rather interesting re-punched date for a very low cost.