Happy St. Patrick's Day!

In the fall of 2007 the Central Bank of Ireland issued a nice pair of gold and silver commemoratives celebrating traditional Irish influence on European Celtic culture. The design of these two coins is quite lovely and displays great interweaving of faces and symbolic items representing Irelands heritage in literature, music, construction and new technology.

The gold coin is small (though we pictured it larger here so you can see the detail) and affordable, having been issued at 50 euro and the silver coin is even more practical at an issue price of 35 euro. A two-piece set is also available from the Central Bank of Ireland website, so check it out and celebrate in style with new precious metal commemorative coinage from Ireland.

Die Set-Up Gold Coin at Stack's

On March 26th Stack's will be offering a very interesting Liberty Twenty Dollar gold piece for sale in their Dominic Gaziano & Papyrus Way auction. Some might catagorize this coin as an error, but it is actually a die trial struck while mint workers would have been in the process of setting up the dies for production.

Once the dies are secured in the coining press, workers will strike a coin. We call these coins die trials. Sometimes a die trial is struck in a softer metal than the production coin. This is often done at an early stage, well before production. Sometimes a square oversized piece of lead may be used. These lead pieces are called splashes. During the process of making the various elements of a coins desing into the die, some mints used to make progressive die trials to see how the work was coming along. These pieces only display a portion of the final coins desing.

This particular coin in Stack's upcoming sale is a set-up die trial. In this case, a die is all ready and production is to begin very soon. The mint workers begin by securing the dies into the coining press. At this point the dies are placed rather far apart, so that they will not clash and be damaged. Then a coin is struck using a planchet of the official metal. As you can see by the softness of the Stack's set-up trial the dies were too far apart, so the mint workers would have adjusted them closer together and this process would have continued until the ejected coin was fully struck up and all details were clearly visable.

Set-up die trails are normally not allowed to leave the premisses of the mint. Most, I believe, are destroyed after the die set-up process is complete.

To find one available for sale in the market is rather rare, so this Stack's lot is a great opportunity for any U.S. Gold collector to add something unique to their collection.

Friday Fix

London pm fixes for 3-14-08

Gold $1003.50

Silver $20.25

Platinum $2107.00

Palladium $512.00

Tom's Recommended Film of the Week

Eastern Promises

Eastern Promises was a film I had been looking forward to for some time. David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen were a potent teaming for A History of Violence and I expected the same impact from Eastern Promises. With it's Russian-American mafia crime basis, this film offers a story of mixed moral themes with characters exhibiting signs of good within the bad and vice versa. It's a film with calm sections and violent moments, much like A History of Violence.

The thing I like about Cronenberg in these recent projects is that he creates a simple seeming piece of entertainment within which he spins complex human emotions and drives. This structure allows for great viewing and lasting thought process from the active viewer. A few weeks after watching A History of Violence, I wanted to see it again because I had been thinking about it all that time. The same was true of Eastern Promises, though the story was actually quite different. In each case it was the themes and character motivations that kept me interested both while watching the film and thinking about it later.

To me, that is one of the signs of great movie making, an ability to keep the viewer involved after the film has ended.

All this being said, I should warn you that both A History of Violence and Eastern Promises contain brutal violence based in a criminal element. Like Stephen King, David Cronenberg has chosen a path, which may alienate his art from some potential consumers, but the fine honing of their craft remains undeniable.

Tom's Recommended Film of the Week

The Four Feathers