The Borselino Magnum Opus Of Newfoundland Coins.

The mod was going to post Barry's works on the site for download to members but I don't see that its been added yet.

Anyone else see it posted anywhere?

@Wade - sorry about that - that was a little cryptic!

This is about an unpublished study of variants in the Newfoundland coins by a guy named Barry Borselino. It's remarkably detailed - clearly a labour of love. More than 450 pages with lots of very good photos of the hundreds of variants he's identified. He has also cobbled POP reports together for all of them - these are extremely useful.

I have a copy now, in PDF form though I'm planning to have it printed out and bound. I'm now hunting for several of the odd-ball mutants he describes - none of which is listed in Charlton or any other reference that I've seen. My faves are the 1945 narrow date 5c and the 1876 super-wide date 1c - I've managed to acquire the 5c. The ones I like best are those that are visible to the naked eye and, by BB's calculations, are very scarce. As in, fewer than 3,000 of them were made in the first place.

Anyway, apparently there's been progress towards making the book more generally available via this site - that's what I was talking about - it would be a worth while endeavour. I gather it's a somewhat daunting challenge because there's a lot of pixels in that sucker. But I think for anyone interested in the Newfoundland coins it is must-read material. Not everything in there is going to be of equal interest - one major expert I've talked to about it expressed concern about the minutiae, suggesting that it could be demotivating for some collectors. I think that's a fair point but that most of us would be able to navigate that particular storm. In fact, Barry himself defines classes of variants depending on how easy they are to identify and that sort of thing. I found that to be a useful way of thinking about what I'm interested in or not.

More to say offline if you're interested. I would love to see this book widely read, discussed and analyzed by anyone who is interested in the Newfoundland coinage.