COINAGE.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Considerations on the present scarcity of silver coins, &c. First and only edition of this scarce pamphlet on coinage, intelligently annotated by the anonymous author on the lower margins of four pages (pp. 11, 22, 31, 33).Addressing an unknown recipient, to whom this copy was presumably presented for review, the comments include the author's worries over possible offence caused by criticisms of others' works (the Assay Master with whom he disagrees "is very tenacious of his opinions and I sho[ul]d be very sorry he sho[ul]d take offence at this as he has been very particularly obliging to me", with further reference to the opinion of Henry Bilson Legge, 1708-1764, Chancellor of the Exchequer); his doubts as to the clarity of his prose ("the arguments are confused here but I intend to make a different arrangement of them and the press is kept open for that purpose as well as to receive any hints you may honour me with", p. 22); the uneven arrangement of the text ("I have thrown what concerns the present scarcity of coin in general into notes that the text might not be loaded and confused with different matters perhaps it wo[ul]d have been better if I had turned those notes into an appendix", p. 31); and a discussion of the changing value of the Pound Sterling ("the gold will be more in quantity and the silver more in value so that the Pound Sterling will be apparently more valuable after such alteration than it is now and why it sho[ul]d be made so is hard to tell", p. 33). De

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