How A Dutch "Knaak" aka 2.5 Gulden Made Me Dig Into Old Dutch Coins

A bit behind with coin sharing

I have been holding off writing about the coins I found during the flea market visits simply because I went down a rabbit hole after picking them up and then I got sick of browsing and forgot about them for a little while. I created a little list of the finds I still wanted to write about recently and after receiving not 1 but 2 packages yesterday, I should start catching up. I've read about an endless waiting list of silver shares several times from other members in the silver gold stackers community and I hope I can avoid that by catching up in the next week or so.

Flea market coin hunting

Although I'd probably not risk picking up any actual silver coins on the flea market in terms of these 1 oz rounds, simply because I feel it's a bit too tricky to get scammed and so far it seems that on every flea market we visited, those that know what they sell are not willing to part with the coins for a good price anyway so I try to not pay too much attention to these sellers for now. I can see how this could change at some point in the future when I'm hunting for a particular coin that is only available from US with high shipping fees for example. I may then be willing to pay a bit more knowing that I still saved a ton on shipping fees.

What do I check then?

I'm mainly making it a fun task for me and my daughter (she likes helping) to go through these plastic buckets of all types of coins, here in Spain I've noticed that most of them are old Spanish pesetas but there's more to be found, such as Italian liras, Dutch gulden and some English coins too.

The thing is, the first times I checked these boxes, I had zero knowledge which years to look for and hoping to spot one of these old circulated coins that accidentally ended up in the cheap box of coins. But that's not the only reason, I also enjoy checking the different designs of coins from countries as in the past, I didn't really pay that much attention to designs and it turns out there's quite a bit of art out there if you look close enough.

One Dutch find!

As I had 0 knowledge about Spanish pesetas and seeing that they are available in abundance, I didn't think it would be smart to pick up any Spanish pesetas the first times on the flea market. Instead, I tried to find something that was familiar to me, such as the Dutch gulden. Before Europe introduced the Euro, we paid with Dutch guldens and I remember that I never really paid much attention to these coins at the time and that I didn't know anything about the history at all. But at least, having some good old (back then) circulated coins in my hand that may bring up a memory here and there can't really hurt if you pick it up for a low price at the flea market, can it?

Learning as I go

I also consider picking up the old Dutch coins for educational purposes to look op particular coins from particular years so that I find out that I should not pick them up if they're older than year X and the reason why etc. I picked up this Dutch gulden and already learned some stuff for future references right after I got home.

The first site I went to to look for info was Numista, to find this info:

As you can see it has the mintmark with a cock (lol):

"God zij met ons" is written on the side..

Source of the three screenshots above is Numista

So this one I have right here is not valuable by any means, but I also find out that the earlier ones are more valuable:

Source three screenshots above is Numista.com

Do I consider this buy a fail?

No, not at all because I didn't think I was buying a real silver coin but more interested in finding some older coins from my home country that would make me dig into some history and compare these years. I tend to better remember if I have something I can hold in my hands and look up rather than only reading information about tons of different coins of different years. It's a small price to pay for me to force myself into reading up and learn a bit more. In the end, at some point, I will remember the ones that are worth buying and can be valuable, and most important the reasons that they are valuable, maybe because of errors on it or because before year X they were made of silver etc.

Keeping my eye out

In the future, I manage to get my hands around one of the 1959-1966 2,5 guldens because I'd like to see the difference and it's nice to have a more valuable comparison in your own collection.. I found tons of similar coins during my next visits but because of this one buy at the first visit, and looking into the 2,5 Dutch guilders after buying it, I knew there was no point in picking up more of these. It made me interested in the other old Dutch coins that I once used myself to pay for stuff in Holland though. But more about that in one of the next posts..

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All pictures above are taken by yours truly, besides the screenshots, those have the source mentioned above.

Posted Using InLeo Alpha

Posted Using InLeo Alpha