1938 Florin - PCGS MS62

Fiji, 1938 Florin -

Small countries with low populations inevitably produce coins with low mintages. Fiji of the mid-twentieth century was no exception. In fact, dust off your Krause catalogue and run your finger down the mintage figures of Fiji’s Commonwealth coins. You’ll find that mintage figures for circulation coins average around 200,000 or 300,000 pieces. The more common coins from the World War II years were minted in San Francisco and then exported to Fiji for use by American sailors stationed there. Those coins have mintages of around 500,000 pieces. Earlier coins, minted in the thirties, have far smaller mintages. The coin photographed above, dated 1938 and minted in London, has a mintage of a mere 20,000 pieces. The number of these that exist in Mint State is far smaller: PCGS has graded only one example in Mint State (the above coin), while the highest-graded example graded by NGC is only AU58 (1/14). The number of ungraded specimens in UNC would be small: I certainly don’t recall seeing any in the last five years. The coin photographed above was sourced from an Australian expatriate living in Fiji during the 1990s. The collector had purchased it from a fellow expatriate and kept it stored in old film tubes with the rest of his collectable Fijian coins. I went through the small Fiji collection and picked out this coin as one of the best in the collection. Although it only graded MS62, it is still the finest graded by both NGC and PCGS and one of the nicest early Fijian florins I have seen to date. Very scarce.