Collecting and valuing … silver
As well as adventures, I intend this blog to gather together my thoughts and results of various researches on collecting items, mainly antique and vintage ones.
The current market
There are two things to look at here: silver as scrap metal, and antique silver as collectable objects in their own right.
Humans have used silver since prehistoric times. It is sometimes found native, and is easy to extract from ore. It is about a hundred times scarcer than copper, but twenty times more common than gold. It has many nice properties: it is the most conductive and reflective metal, it has the best balance of being antibacterial yet nontoxic, and is ductile and malleable yet strong.
Silver therefore has many industrial applications, and while some have become obsolete (photographic film) others take their place (solar cells). The current silver price is around £450 per kilogram.
In terms of domestic silver, we easily forget how limited the choices were for making things out of metal before stainless steel was developed in the early 20th century. Iron and steel rust, copper (also used to make brass and bronze) reacts with food and can be toxic, and gold is very expensive. So for many household objects, silver was the obvious metal to use.
Silver does have disadvantages. It tarnishes in air, although this can largely be avoided by keeping the item in a cupboard or drawer and/or lacquering it, and it still reacts with food a little. Much domestic silver has ended up melted down for its scrap value, though after many years in the doldrums demand for antique silver has risen again.
Questions to ask about an item you think is silver
Is it solid silver?
The first thing you should do is look for hallmarks, which are marks stamped or lasered into the metal.
All precious metals are a bit too soft to make domestic objects, unless you mix in some other metal to harden them. That creates a lot of potential for fraud, so to protect the consumer the UK has very strict laws on selling items as precious metal. In most cases the item has to have been tested for fineness by an independent assay office, which adds hallmarks to confirm the standard, the test location, the date and the maker.
This makes collecting silver a lot more fun, because you can identify so much about the item. The only problem is that many items that aren’t solid silver have confusingly similar hallmarks, in the same way knock-off brands copy the designs of premium brands.
The baddie here is electroplated nickel silver (EPNS). This was made in huge quantities as a cheap alternative to solid silver, and is base metal with a layer of silver plating that may only be a few atoms thick. EPNS items, unless they have exceptional artistic merit, have very little value. Marks that look like hallmarks but are just the maker’s initials, or marks like “A1”, “EP” or even “international silver” or “Sheffield silver” mean it’s EPNS.
There is another, older type of plating called Old Sheffield Plate. It was made by fusing layers of silver and copper, and has all kinds of unofficial marks. It is much rarer than EPNS, so while it’s worth nearly as much as the same item in solid silver, you are much less likely to stumble across something made of it.
What you want to find is the lion mark, as second from left here:
That indicates the item was hallmarked in England and is sterling silver: 92.5% silver, 7.5% copper. Scotland’s equivalent used to be a thistle mark, but they now use a similar lion, while Ireland’s equivalent is a crowned harp.
There are a couple of spot checks you can do to differentiate between EPNS and sterling. EPNS is usually slightly heavier than the same item in sterling, and has a harsher white colour: the copper in sterling gives it a soft, warm tinge. If in places the silver has worn away to expose a greenish metal underneath, that’s a dead giveaway for EPNS.
If you still think an item is solid silver but it has either no hallmarks or foreign hallmarks, things get problematic. Very small items (below 7.78g for silver) and coins are exempt from hallmarking, and pre-1950 items can be sold without hallmarks if the vendor can otherwise (somehow) prove their fineness. Hallmarks of a few other countries are accepted by the UK but many aren’t, especially post-Brexit. If you actually have something really valuable but foreign, e.g. American Colonial silver, it’s probably best sold where it was made – though that can get into a whole complicated world of export licensing that’s beyond my scope.
How much does it weigh?
Domestic sterling silver was produced in huge quantities from the 18th to the 20th centuries. So plain, common items aren’t really worth more than their scrap value, which is still non-trivial. A check on eBay confirms baseline values are about £10 for a teaspoon, £30 for a table fork, up to £400 or so for a hefty tray.
Is there anything special about it?
In a few cases silver items definitely are worth more than scrap. Here’s what to look for in the other hallmarks.
Date letters can be checked with a free online guide [e.g. http://www.silvercollection.it/englishsilverhallmarks.html]. Through most of the 18th and 19th centuries there was also a sovereign’s head mark, which narrows it down quickly. Items that are very old, i.e. 17th century or earlier, are rare and can be hugely valuable. But be careful about authenticity of these, because hallmarks can be faked or transferred.
Maker’s marks can be quite confusing, but there are a few to look out for. Initials that are particularly promising are PL, HB, PS, NM, OR or SD. These respectively stand for Paul de Lamerie, Hester Bateman (18th century), Paul Storr, Nathaniel Mills (19th century), Omar Ramsden, and Stuart Devlin (20th century), who are six of the best silversmiths of all time. Anything by them will be worth well above baseline.
The vast majority of British silver has been assayed at London (leopard’s head), Birmingham (anchor) or Sheffield (rose). Items assayed at small offices that have long since shut down, like Newcastle, York or Norwich, are rare and valuable. Irish silver is also scarce. A basic Dublin-marked teaspoon will be worth £30, compared to £10 for a London one, and that multiplier will be much more for items that are rare in the first place.
Moving away from the hallmarks, items that have an unusual, quirky function and/or artistic merit will also have value in their own right. For cutlery, decorative patterns are worth more than plain, and engraved crests add value though monograms tend to subtract it.
Comments
Post a Comment