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1739-CC Billon Sous Marques. Vlack UNLISTED or Vlack 278? Rarity-7?

Currency:CAD Category:Coins & Paper Money Start Price:150.00 CAD Estimated At:400.00 - 450.00 CAD
1739-CC Billon Sous Marques.  Vlack UNLISTED or Vlack 278?  Rarity-7?

Buyer’s Premiums will be added on all items as per the Terms & Conditions of the sale. Invoices will be emailed out after The Toronto Coin Expo.

CC – Besancon Mint - 1739-CC Billon Sous Marques. Vlack UNLISTED or Vlack 278? Rarity-7? Nearly Very Fine, just a bit weak at the central details, but the legends, date and mintmark are all sharp. Nice light olive color, traces of the original silvering around the obverse device, the surfaces lightly grainy but free of any mark or damage. The planchet slightly out of round. A mystery for the specialist to solve! The present piece has no stop after the word SIT, whereas the Vlack book calls for a stop there for his 278 variety, which this otherwise matches. This would normally mean a new variety, however in examining the Vlack coin sold in the January, 2008 sale of his collection, that piece also shows no stop, and one would expect that the author of a book that dealt with minute variations in legend and punctuation would have noticed this was something different, so it could just be that the book had a typographical error, and the stop shouldn’t have been there for the 278 listing. But, adding to the problem, the Vlack book gives the 278 variety a Rarity-1 rating, which certainly cannot be true, as the Besancon mint pieces are all quite rare – and when the Vlack coin was sold it was catalogued as Rarity-7; if the rarity rating was a typographical error in the book, which appears to be the case, then it is likely that the description of the 278 variety also had a typo, and that variety should be the same as that offered here and in the Vlack sale (as well as the one illustrated in the Ford auction).