Gold and silver
Collectible Gold and Silver
Collectible gold and silver, as this guide uses the term, means coins, flatware, jewelry, medals, and small worked objects that are bought, sold, and studied as pieces with a maker, a date, a design, or a history attached to them, not as raw metal weighed out for its content alone. A Morgan dollar, a set of sterling flatware, a Victorian gold locket, and a commemorative medal all belong here, even though every one of them also happens to contain a measurable amount of precious metal.
That double identity, part object and part metal, is the reason this guide exists. Two different questions can be asked of the same piece: what is the metal in it worth, and what is the object itself worth as a collectible. The two answers are sometimes close together and sometimes very far apart, and confusing them is one of the most common mistakes people make with gold and silver. This page is a reference, not a shop, and nothing here is an offer to buy, sell, or appraise anything.
Two kinds of value, one piece of metal
Every gold or silver object carries what is usually called melt value or intrinsic value: the value of the metal itself, set by its weight, its purity, and the current market price of that metal. This number exists whether or not anyone ever cares about the object as a collectible, and it is the floor under almost everything in this category, because a piece rarely sells for meaningfully less than its metal is worth, though it very often sells for more.
Collectible value, sometimes called numismatic value for coins, sits on top of that floor and depends on entirely different things: how rare the piece is, who made it, what condition it is in, what history it carries, and how many collectors currently want one like it. A common, well-worn silver dollar might trade close to its melt value. A rare date in high grade can sell for many multiples of that same coin's metal content. The metal is identical in both cases. The premium is not about the metal at all.
Purity marks: reading what a piece claims to be
Purity is usually stated on the piece itself, and the two common systems are karat and fineness. Karat describes gold purity out of 24 parts: 24k is pure gold, 22k is about 91.6 percent gold, 18k is 75 percent, 14k is about 58.3 percent, and 10k is about 41.7 percent, with the remainder made up of other metals alloyed in for strength and color. Fineness describes the same idea as parts per thousand, so a mark of 750 states the same purity as 18k, and 585 sits close to 14k.
Silver has its own set of standard purities. Fine silver is 99.9 percent silver, sterling is 92.5 percent, and older United States coin silver is 90 percent, with the balance in each case made up mostly of copper for hardness. A stamped mark is a strong starting clue but not proof by itself: marks wear away, get faked, or belong to a piece that has since been altered, which is one reason professional testing exists for anything where the answer actually matters.
Troy ounces: the other number underneath the math
Precious metal is weighed in troy ounces rather than the ordinary avoirdupois ounces used for most everyday weighing, and the two are not the same unit. A troy ounce is heavier than a regular ounce, so a scale set to the wrong unit will quietly misstate a weight in a way that still looks plausible. Any melt-value calculation, any quoted spot price, and most bullion listings use the troy ounce as the base unit, so it is worth confirming which unit a scale or a listing is actually using before trusting a number.
Weight, purity, and the metal's current market price are the three inputs behind melt value, and how they combine, with a clearly labeled worked example, is covered in full on the page linked below. This overview only needs to establish that the three numbers exist and that all three have to be correct for any resulting figure to mean anything.
How the pages in this guide fit together
Melt value explained walks through the calculation itself, weight in troy ounces times fineness times the current spot price, along with why refiners and buyers routinely pay under that number rather than at it. Collectible versus bullion value covers the more consequential question of when an object is worth meaningfully more as a collectible than as metal, and why melting the wrong piece destroys value that cannot be put back. Testing gold and silver at home looks at the common tests people use to get a first read on a piece, along with their real limits and the safety issues that come with some of them.
Read the three together before drawing any conclusion about a specific piece, since the melt-value math, the collectible-versus-bullion question, and the limits of home testing all bear on the same decision from different angles. From gold and silver, the collecting path in this guide continues on to auctions, where objects change hands in a very different setting than the one described here. The San Antonio antiques guide maps the rest of the subjects this site covers.