Featured I have spoons to share today

That's the fish one I like too! Thanks!

 

@MrNate, what do you estimate the total melt value to be? Not suggesting you melt them, just wondering how to know how much to spend on such items. I realize they may sell for more to collectors.

 

Great question, it's a little less than 200 grams of silver (I weighed without the two mexico spoons since they have large attachments).

When I'm searching for spoon collections, I'm definitely going off probabilities. When I looked at the three original photos, I start by asking myself "is there any sterling in there"? I try to find the most obvious piece, for this listing it was the pieces with cutouts on the handles. By the way, I didn't appreciate it when I was looking at the original photos, but some of the spoons are the larger 5 1/2" size, I was pleasantly surprised to see that.

So if I find an obvious piece I can look up and verify that's great, but really it's about the tone of the spoon, the design etc. Then I start evaluating the group, some positives you can see in the original photos:

-Uneven tarnish
-Designs in the bowls
-Lots of good looking tone
-A nice cabinet display
-*a uhaul box in the background, they're likely moving and trying to lighten their load. This isn't an insignificant clue; contrast that with seeing the same photo inside an antique store, I know the entire set is very likely to be plated
-Always happy to see mexico spoons, more often they're silver

So for the price of the listing, I wasn't going to bother the seller to give me more photos. It's enough data for me to take the gamble on what looked like a number of nice pieces.

 

congrats Mr Nate, another great score