Essays from the
departments.

Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy — LIBS — is not a new technique. Geologists have used it for thirty years; the technique has been mounted on the Mars rovers since 2012. What is new is the affordable, bench-scale instrument: a self-contained unit the size of a desktop printer that produces a full elemental fingerprint from a single 50-micron laser pulse. We installed our first such unit in March 2024.

Our principal use case is the detection of struck forgeries of British sovereigns produced between 2019 and 2024 in a small workshop in eastern Europe. These forgeries are made from gold of the correct fineness, struck from hand-engraved dies copied directly from genuine examples, and produced in sufficient numbers to have crossed into mainstream auctions. They cannot be detected by weight or by traditional comparative die analysis.

What LIBS reveals is the trace-element signature of the gold itself. Genuine Royal Mint gold of the post-1817 sovereign series carries a characteristic profile of silver, copper and trace platinum-group elements consistent with the refining methods of the Mint over time. The eastern European forgeries, although correct to the third decimal place on fineness, carry a quite different trace profile — consistent with modern recycled gold of mixed industrial origin.

The technique is non-destructive at our power settings; the pulse leaves a crater of roughly 20 microns, invisible to the unaided eye, ordinarily placed on the rim. The protocol now forms part of the standard numismatic intake for any sovereign of post-1817 date. The existence of these forgeries does not undermine the long-term position of the sovereign as a collectable. It does make the third-party certificate more important than it has been in fifty years.

The Books Department has, since its founding in 2022, accepted restored volumes for grading and certification. Restoration, conservatively defined, was disclosed on the certificate; aggressive restoration was downgraded; replacement leaves were noted. After fifteen months of consultation with the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association and the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association, that policy has been revised. We will, from 1 January 2026, no longer certify volumes in which the original block has been compromised.

The change reflects two concerns. The first is the increasing sophistication of restoration: techniques originally developed for institutional conservation are now within reach of any well-equipped private bindery, and are very nearly invisible. The second is the market consequence of certifying such work: a certificate confers transferable trust, and that trust has, in a small number of cases we have reviewed, attached itself to volumes that no senior cataloguer would have called complete.

Three cases illustrate the difficulty. A 1623 First Folio offered to us in 2024 contained five sympathetically reset leaves, three of which carried text reproduced from facsimile. A 1687 Principia offered in early 2025 had been re-backed with period calf taken from a separate volume of similar date. A 1922 first issue of Ulysses had been entirely re-cased in modern wrappers printed from the same plates as the originals — work of museum quality, indistinguishable from the genuine.

Our considered view is that the proper role of third-party certification, in books as in other fields, is to certify the original — not to grade an interpretation of it. We will continue to issue informal opinion letters on restored volumes for institutional clients. We will not, however, encapsulate them in the Xene clamshell, nor enter them in the public registry as Xene-certified copies.

Plate 11 of the 1840 Penny Black has occupied an unusual place in philatelic literature: late, scarce, and — until now — imperfectly censused. The standard reference, completed in 2001, listed 348 confirmed examples. With the assistance of Xene's philatelic team and the cooperation of fourteen institutional and twenty-six private collections, the Royal Philatelic Society of London has completed the first full census in twenty-four years. We now confirm 511 examples — a sixty per cent increase, accounted for almost entirely by entries newly emerging from estates between 2014 and 2024.

Three findings are of particular interest. First, the previously presumed scarcity of multiples has been revised: we now confirm eleven pairs, three strips of three, and the single recorded block of four, unchanged since 2001. Second, the distribution by sheet position is markedly different from earlier estimates, suggesting either an undercounting in 2001 or, more probably, that the original sheets were divided horizontally in the post offices.

Third, and most surprisingly, the proportion of examples on cover has fallen — from 11.2 per cent in 2001 to 7.4 per cent today. Several entries on cover in 2001 have, in the intervening period, been removed and offered separately at auction — a practice the trade should regard with discomfort. The philatelic literature owes a duty of care to the artefact, and the removal of stamps from their accompanying letters is a small but cumulative loss to the historical record.

Methodologically, the census relied on new high-resolution photography at 1200 dpi with raking light, comparative plating, and — for doubtful examples — UV examination at our Hatton Garden laboratory. Inquiries from holders of further Plate 11 material are welcomed.

The encapsulation of sealed trading-card product is a recent problem. Until 2019 the market for booster boxes and elite trainer boxes was modest enough that collectors accepted the original cardboard packaging as sufficient. The subsequent rise of sealed-product collecting, particularly in Pokémon, has changed the calculus. A 1999 Base Set booster box that traded for £1,200 in 2018 may, today, change hands at fifty times that figure. Cardboard, however original, is no longer enough.

The Atelier in Guildford spent eighteen months designing a sealed-product holder to a brief set by our cards department. The constraints were unusual. The holder had to accommodate seven distinct factory formats, from the slim 1999 Pokémon booster box to the bulky modern Magic factory case. It had to be reversible — openable at a future date only by destruction of the seal — and it had to permit visual inspection of every panel of the original packaging. It had, finally, to survive a century of typical light exposure without yellowing.

The result is a two-piece machined acrylic cradle, sealed with a sonic weld at four corners, fitted with an inert microfibre liner that prevents contact stress on the original wrap. A 50-micron Mylar window on each face permits visual inspection. The holder accepts an embedded NFC chip and a laser-engraved certificate number on the rim.

We subjected the holder to accelerated ultraviolet testing at the University of Surrey, using a 340 nm filtered xenon-arc lamp at 60 W/m². After the equivalent of fifty years, the acrylic showed a Δb* of 0.4 — within the threshold of visible yellowing — and the liner showed no measurable degradation. After the equivalent of a century, Δb* had risen to 0.9: detectable to a calibrated instrument, but not to the unaided eye. The holder is now in production.

The certification of paper currency has always carried a small but real compliance burden. Bank notes, unlike coins or stamps, are issued by states; the question of who issued them, when, and under what authority can — in a small number of cases — engage the attention of regulators. The events of 2022 onward have made that small minority materially larger. This note summarises the documentation we now require for any submission of paper currency originating from a jurisdiction subject to OFSI (United Kingdom) or OFAC (United States) restrictions.

The first principle is that historical material — issued before any relevant sanction regime — is, in the great majority of cases, freely tradeable, and we will grade it on the same basis as any other historical material. The complication arises with material issued by sanctioned regimes after the imposition of sanctions, or whose chain of custody passes through a sanctioned jurisdiction during the sanctioned period. In such cases we require documentation establishing the lawful acquisition of the item by the submitter.

The acceptable documentation is of three kinds: an export licence or general licence covering the relevant transfer; a bill of sale or auction receipt predating the sanction; or, in the case of inherited material, a probate inventory or equivalent estate document. We will not grade material for which none of these can be produced; we will return it without comment and at our expense.

The regime is dynamic. A jurisdiction added this year may be removed next year; material whose status was unclear today may be straightforward tomorrow. We review our acceptance criteria quarterly. Compliance work of this kind is not the most agreeable part of the trade — but it is the price of operating an institution whose word is meant to carry weight across borders.