Lasqueti Mint Ceases Operation

A couple of months back I bought an 'eclectic lot' of coins from a guy out on the West Coast. When I received it he had written on the packing slip that he had included a bonus Lasqueti Island coin. I didn't think much of it as I had never heard of Lasqueti Island before; I just assumed it was like the Cook Islands or something. A couple of weeks back and was finally getting caught up on my cataloguing and googled Lasqueti Island to get some information about the coin. I found a website for the mint at http://www.lqmint.com/ and was very surprised to find out it was an island right here in Canada in the Strait of Georgia, BC! I was even more intrigued when I read the articles in the About Us section http://www.lqmint.com/aboutus.php & http://www.lqmint.com/images/MonetaNew.pdf describing how each coin is essentially hand made using an old nineteenth century drop hammer! I also reviewed the catalogue and saw that of all their coins only two have a mintage of over 1,000 and many have mintages of less than 100. Also they are almost all struck in pure silver or gold. I thought about it for a bit and then contacted them to get information on subscribing only to find out that they had to cease operations last month (01 July 2012) "due to the inability to find the technical expertise needed to create dies etc." The coins are expensive compared to say the mass produced NCLTs from the RCM but I just loved the story behind them and that they are such rare works of art so I ordered some that were still in stock. I did a search through the forum threads and while there were a few mentions of Lasqueti Mint coins there didn't seem to be a thread dedicated to it so I thought I'd start one. Here are pictures of a few of the coins that just arrived yesterday. Sorry they're a bit blurry but I didn't want to take them out of the capsules to get them flush against the scanner glass. If you have any others please post them!