Ever since coins have been collected there have been individuals who have attempted to improve the appearance of a coin in order to increase its retail value. I can still vividly remember about eight or nine years ago standing chatting to a coin dealer in an antique market. While we chatted he was casually sitting behind his stall examining his stock and vigorously polishing with a brush any coins that he felt needed attention. If only he could have seen these coins under a microscope he would have realise the damage he was doing to the coins' surface. Strange as it may seem I did not buy any coins from this dealer.

The subject of improving a coin's appearance hit the coin news headlines at the end of May this year when USA coin grading company PCGS announce that their parent company, Collectors Universe, Inc., had, "filed a Federal Court suit in United States District Court, Central District of California, against several individuals claiming they engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity, breach of contract, conspiracy, unfair competition and fraud for allegedly submitting 'doctored' coins to PCGS for grading on multiple occasions for a period of years." The suit claims that, "coins ... were deceptively altered in an attempt to increase their value." It said, "Defendants knew that these coins had been 'doctored", and that, "Their methods included lasering the surfaces of extremely rare proof gold coins to remove surface imperfections, building up commonly-worn or weakly-struck portions of coins, and other physical and chemical processes."

I must admit to surprise as to the extent of these problems in the USA's coin trade. In the UK I have not come across or at least identified practices such as laser cleaning and adding filling material to a coin surface. However a group of silver coins I have examined recently certainly brought home to me that it is not only at its bottom end that the UK market has problems of its own. This group of relatively high-priced, milled coins showed evidence of chemical dipping to remove tarnishing or toning, significant abrasive polishing and in one case tooling.

When examining the subject of "improving" coins one must be very careful not to treat every type of operation as bad. One certainly must be very clear about definitions. Cleaning a coin means removing material that has been deposited onto it. It does not cover removing any corrosion such as tarnishing where the coin's metal surface has chemically reacted with its environment. Removing corrosion products such as sulphide tarnishing also removes metal that was once part of the coins surface. This may be acceptable in treating coins recovered from archaeological excavations but certainly have no place in treating milled coins. There are obviously categories of coins and treatments that fall between these two extremes and drawing up the boundaries between the two can be difficult. Certainly openness about the treatment a coin has received has to be the minimum requirement. To me hiding if coin has had any treatment is tantamount to fraud.

In my own professional life I have been involved in a number of coin improvement treatments, most I have judged to be acceptable. Readers may like to judge for themselves. Mainly I have often taken a coin and removed any dirty or grease by placing it in a dilute soap solution in an ultra-sonic bath, rinsed it in deionised water and dried the coin by dabbing with a paper tissue. I doubt many would worry about this operation as it does not remove any metal or cause any abrasion of the coin surface.

One of the more interesting operations I was involved in was assisting in removing a large amount of iron oxide[rust]/chloride from the gold sovereigns recovered from the wreck of the Royal Mail Steamer Duoro. I used a very strong and aggressive, hot acid that did not attack the 91.7% gold alloy used in sovereigns. This operation gave me the chance to examine numerous interesting and rare nineteenth century sovereigns. These included George IV and William IV sovereigns, Victorian "Ansell" sovereigns and early Victorian Australian sovereigns. How I wish I had had the knowledge I have now when I examined them. My judgement was that this case was similar to an archaeological excavation and acceptable.

This article describes the examination of a 1809 Spanish-American 8-reales with a J.Leckie five shillings countermark. Only one other example of a J.Leckie countermark is known on a coin held by the British Museum. The author concludes that the examined coin is genuine but its countermark is fake. This conclusion is based on a detailed visual examination of the coin comparing it to the BM example. The author then continues to speculate on the origin of the piece. The provenance points to the countermark originating in the twentieth century. One possibility being that the piece was produced for New York dealer William C. Wells by Hans Schulman. Harry Manville is described as saying that the contemporary joke was that his company "Schulman Coin and Mint", was more accurate than he perhaps intended. It must be emphasised there is no firm proof that Schulman was involved in manufacturing fake coins. Another theory is that the countermark is of very recent south-east Asia origin.