Urgent Help Required!napoleon 1808 Turin Mint U Franc?

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion)

If this is your auction. Pull the listing off now. Stay on with us and we can help you ID the coin some more and figure out how to get you some better pictures. The last thing you want to do is mistakingly sell a £500.00 coin for £2.00.

I'm really looking forward to seeing pics of this coin. It may be worth quite a bit more than $100.

Personally, I'm not sure what the fuss is about with the coin on the French auction site linked to above; The Krause (2004) catalogue value for that coin (KM# 692.15) is "only" US$100 in Fine, US$225 in Very Fine - and it looks too worn to class as VF by my reckoning. Unless it's some scarce variety not mentioned in Krause (or Napoleonics have had a 1000% increase in value in the last three years!), I have no idea why it hit such an astronomical value as €1312.00.

For your coin, frenchcoin, the same Krause book lists it at US$125 in Fine, US$300 in VF (KM# 682.13, mintage 13,000). From what I could tell from the pics, it looked fairly well worn, but still, it's worth more than the £2 you might have gotten if that auction had proceeded!

I did see the auction link briefly before it was pulled from this thread, and have a few suggestions to increase prospective bids, if yo do decide to go ahead and sell it on ebay.

You need nice clear pics. The pics you had were fuzzy blobs, which to a potential bidder is worse than useless - they're likely to think you have something to hide. If that's the best you can do with your camera, try a flatbed scanner or borrow someone else's camera. Make sure it's got a good macro-zoom function to focus real close on tiny objects like coins.

Your auction title didn't help. Anyone wanting a coin like yours would do an ebay search for things like "Napoleonic France 1 franc 1808 U (Turin) heart" - and they wouldn't have found your coin, because most of those keywords weren't in your title. Sure, you weren't quite sure what you had when you first listed it - now you know better.

Finally, you limited yourself to UK bidders only. That's your choice, I know, and I have no idea what hassles you might encounter in shipping international from Britain, but there are probably lots more people in France and continental Europe prepared to pay top money for it, than you'll find on the island.

I hope this proves to be of some use to you.

Hello again!

First of all I hope to get clear pictures of the coin up by the end of the week,my sisters going to lend me her camera(which has no batteries!grr)towards the end of the week,I know we have a scanner around here somewhere which used to be very handy for when I sold a few other coins on ebay many years ago.....im now beggining to wonder what they were!

I totally understand now that the auction was a poor mistake to make,if i'd have known that it would we worth more that the £2 when I listed it for then I sure would have gone down a different route!
But thankfully I got it off in time!

Thankyou sap for your listing ideas,I will be sure to keep them in mind!

I found out today that my grandma visted my french auntie in the 70's
in France and was given boxes of items that had been kept in the out building for many years,possible up to 60.So its quite possible that this was in one of those boxes.......its only speculation but it does figure.

To t360 and anyone else with experience in the coin market,if when I put the pictures up and if you guys think its geniune where do I go from there to get the possible outcome?
I dont really want to list it again on ebay because I did get the feeling that people were heavily under bidding,or at least trying to get a bargain...which again now I can fully understand given the picture quality and so on.

I will have no hesitations tho in listing it anywhere worldwide,I dont want to sound greedy,I just want to get the most for this coin as I'm really strapped for cash at the moment.

Cheers all once again for your help

Hello Frenchcoin

SAP said you limited the sale to UK only
French and Possibly German collectors may bid a lot more
You can offer the coin directly on ebay France
The easiest way to get their bids is to open a Euro account at a bank
in Great Britain
This way they can pay you in Euro transfer without cost for them or you ( otherwise the cost is 15 to 20 euro to pay in pounds to a pound account )

Of course you will have to convert to pounds but that only costs like 3 % instead of the buyer losing 15 to 20 euro and not bidding

This forum will give you problems if the pics are too wide or to many kilos
I thought below 50 K and below 400 width is what I aim for
The forum software will say accepted but will not show the pic if you go over the max width

Hmmm, I can't read a denomination there at all. I thought it might even be a half franc - those say "DEMI FRANC" across the wreath, instead of "1 FRANC", with an otherwise identical. But you said your coin was 23mm diameter; that corresponds to a 1 franc (halves are only 18mm diameter).

Unfortunately, given the apparent disappearance of the denomination lettering and lack of tarnish in a circular patch inside the wreath, I suspect the coin may have been "mounted" at one stage - turned into jewellery such as a button, pendant or cuff link, with Napoleon's portrait showing. This was a common fate for old coins. The mount would then have been removed at a later date, turning it back into a coin.

A coin "ex mount" will be worth considerably less to a collector than an undamaged specimen, effectively dropping at least two grades condition-wise. We'd need to see the better pics to look for signs of damage there (scratches or file marks where a mount may have been removed). Don't be disappointed yet; it may simply be a very weakly struck centre and/or worn dies; I wouldn't know how unusual that might be for that mint.