Córdoba 1 Real, 1843: a provincial coin with a gap in its legend

Read on the coin, the legend is CONFEDER DA J.P.P.; the catalogue gives CONFEDERADA J.P.P. The difference is one A. Where it should stand there is a smooth blank, and at the blank's inner edge a small smooth pit. The obverse legend, PROVINCIA DE CORDOVA, reads as the catalogue has it.

Is the gap in the die or in this coin? A second coin from these dies, in a photograph you relayed from Río de la Plata Compañía Numismática, shows the same arms, the same sun and the same blank between the R and the D, by eye. That is the best evidence we have that the die itself lacked the letter: an engraver's omission, which a specialist may recognise as a known die. We do not hold that photograph on file and we have not examined the second coin; the comparison is yours and the examiner's, by eye.

The automatic letter reader, which places the catalogue's letters on the measured surface, found 3 of the 14 letters at their place on this face; that corroborates the examiner's reading, it is not the reading itself. On a coin this small, photographed at 26.5 pixels per millimetre, a letter spans only a few dozen pixels; the reading rests on the photographs, and the strip shows what the reader had to work with.

What our evidence does support is narrower and firmer: this coin and the relayed photograph of another show the same arms and sun dies by eye, including the blank in the legend. Whether those dies are the ones Janson numbers A6 and R2 is a question for the reference and a die study. The catalogue lists the type under Numista #345158 as KM#17 and CJ#42.1 to CJ#42.7; that is as far as our own reading goes.

If you send us the label and the photograph, they go on file with the record, and the attribution is then on record as the seller's, with what it rests on, for whoever examines the coin next.

Both figures are facts set beside the catalogue, not verdicts. The catalogue's sister types, the other Córdoba reals of 1843-44 with the national arms, list 3.2 g (five) or 3.5 g (three) and 20 mm (each of the eight), so a coin of this weight is not out of place in the family even if it is heavy for its own type. A thicker, slightly smaller flan would give a coin both heavier and smaller across; so would a different listing. No distribution of this type's weights is on file, so we apply no tolerance and print no verdict.

The weighing is yours; we hold no record of the balance or its resolution, and we did not caliper the coin: the diameters come from the photographed outline at the rig's scale. The explanations still open are an original on an unusual flan, clipping or later metal loss, and an entry or balance error in the declared weight. Metal density, which would say whether the flan is silver of the expected fineness, is not measured: the coin's volume from the two faces rests on the relief amplitude, which is not yet validated on this instrument.

The examiner's reading of the photographs is detail comparable to Extremely Fine. Softer are the sleeves of the forearms and, on the sun side, the broad rays and the R at the upper right; those last two are flat in the die itself, the second coin from these dies shows them the same, and they are not counted as wear.

Two things would move the reading: a loupe showing wear on the sun's cheeks and the knuckles of the hands would make it Very Fine; a loupe showing none would make it About Uncirculated. Graded coins of this series scanned on this instrument would calibrate it; none has been. This is a reading of photographs, not a certified grade, and no Sheldon number is given.