Sell sovereigns and gold coins

Is it a sovereign, and is it real?

A sovereign is smaller than people expect: 22 mm across, a shade wider than a twenty pence piece, with a finely milled edge. The usual reverse shows St George on horseback killing a dragon; some reigns show a crowned shield instead. The obverse carries the monarch's head and the date sits either under the head or beneath the dragon, depending on the design.

The sovereign family, as published by The Royal Mint

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Weight and diameter together catch most fakes. A gilt brass replica of the right diameter will be light; one made to the right weight will be too thick. Real sovereigns also have a crisp, even milled edge and sharp detail in the dragon's scales and the horse's mane, where a cast copy is soft and slightly sugary under a magnifier. Real coins are not magnetic.

The letter under the hooves, and why the date matters

Sovereigns were struck in London and at six branch mints across the Empire, and each branch put a small mintmark on the coin: a single letter, except at Pretoria, which used SA. On a St George reverse it sits on the ground line below the horse's back hooves; on a shield reverse it is beneath the shield. It is small enough that most people have never noticed it, and it is the first thing we look for.

• S for Sydney, M for Melbourne and P for Perth, the Australian branch mints; some dates from each are scarce
• C for Ottawa, I for Bombay and SA for Pretoria, with smaller output again; Bombay struck sovereigns in one year only, 1918
• No letter means London, which struck the great majority of them
• A shield in place of St George is an earlier design, and one collectors follow by date
• A young or a jubilee head of Victoria, rather than the old veiled head, is again a matter of date, not of gold

Condition matters as much as rarity and the two multiply. A scarce date that has spent forty years in a pocket is a worn scarce date. A common date that never circulated, with its original lustre still in the fields, can be worth considerably more than a worn scarce one. This is why nothing is judged from the weight alone, and it is set out further in selling sovereigns without losing the premium.

Britannias, Krugerrands and the rest of the tin

Modern bullion coins are a different proposition from sovereigns: they were bought as gold rather than spent as money, and they are usually still in the packaging they were sold in. They are easy to identify because everything about them is published by the mint that struck them.

Bullion coins seen most often

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Older world gold turns up too: French twenty franc angels and roosters, Swiss vrenelis, American double eagles, Indian and Ottoman coins with no Latin lettering at all. None of it needs identifying by you. Put it in the parcel and it is identified here, and anything that carries collector interest is named on the list rather than counted as bullion.

The three things that cost people money before posting

• Leave coins in their capsules, cases, tubes and wallets. They can be photographed and weighed in them.
• Hold a loose coin by its edge, between finger and thumb, and put each one in its own small bag or paper envelope.
• Do not rub a coin to see the date more clearly. A pencil eraser is abrasive and leaves the same fine scratches polish does.
• Keep certificates, mint packaging and old purchase receipts with the coins. They are part of what the coin is.
• A coin soldered into a pendant mount is still a coin. Leave the mount on; taking it off at home usually tears the rim.

Send the whole tin, not the coin you looked up

Coins come in biscuit tins, in blue Whitman folders, in envelopes marked in a grandparent's handwriting, and mixed in with foreign holiday change and a few old pennies. Send it as it is. Picking out the ones that look gold means someone at home has already made the judgement the whole exercise exists to make, and gilded base metal is very good at looking gold.

Albums and folders are worth keeping together for a different reason: a complete run of dates, or a set as it was issued, can be worth more assembled than the same coins scattered. If the collection is arranged, leave the arrangement alone and tell us it is arranged. Sorting is our job everywhere else in this catalogue, but an order somebody else put there is information.

For a collection of any size, or anything you think may be scarce, photographs are the sensible first move: both faces, flat on a plain surface, in daylight rather than under a lamp. A parcel of gold coins is small, heavy and valuable, so tell us roughly what is coming and the cover and packing are settled in writing before anything is posted. How a parcel is packed and covered goes through it. If the coins were inherited, probate and estate jewellery and tax when you sell inherited gold and coins are worth reading first.

What happens to coins when they arrive

1. Counted and photographedThe lot is recorded before anything is handled individually, packaging included, so there is a picture of exactly what was in the parcel.
2. Identified one at a timeType, date, mintmark, reign and design are read and written down. This is the slow part and it is the part that protects you.
3. Checked against the specificationThe balance is checked against a reference mass first. The coin is then weighed to a hundredth of a gram, and its diameter and thickness are compared with the issuing mint's published figures. Where an analyser is available, the alloy is read at the surface as well. A forgery rarely matches them all.
4. Graded for conditionWear, lustre, edge knocks and any evidence of cleaning or mounting are noted, because condition decides more than date does.
5. Listed, then one offerYou get a list naming every coin and saying which ones carry collector interest. Then one written offer for the lot, which you accept or decline; offers, returns and payment covers both answers.

Nothing is scratched, filed or acid-tested. A destructive test on a coin destroys the very thing the identification exists to protect, and there is no version of this work where it is necessary. The methods used instead, and what each of them can and cannot prove, are on testing and XRF.

What we buy, and what we leave out

Stopped before anything is treated as scrap

• Scarce dates, branch mintmarks and early reigns are named and set aside rather than treated as metal
• Coins with original lustre or unusually sharp detail are assessed on condition before anything else
• Proof coins in sealed cases with their certificates are kept together and assessed as proofs
• Complete date runs, albums and issued sets are assessed assembled, never broken up first
• Pre-Victorian milled and hammered coins are never treated as bulk
• A coin in a mount is checked for rim damage before the mount is considered separately