About Restrike

Restrike is a reference catalogue of gold coins. Its premise is narrow: describe every coin to the same specification, so that two of them can be compared without first translating between a mint's brochure, a dealer's listing and a catalogue's shorthand.

The problem it exists to solve

Look up the same coin on three sites and you get three different documents. One gives the gross weight but not the fine gold. One says "22 carat" and never states the fineness. One quotes a price and never says what year or which mint. None of them agree on what a "type" is, or where the line between a type and an issue falls.

That is fine when you are reading about one coin. It falls apart the moment you want to answer a comparative question: which of these two carries more gold, what does a quarter-ounce of each cost at spot, which mints struck this design in 1925. Every one of those questions requires the same fields, filled in the same way, for both coins. So that is what this catalogue is: the same fields, filled in the same way.

How it is built

The vocabulary is Numista's, because it is the one the trade already shares and there was nothing to gain from inventing another. An issuer is the authority that struck the coin, in a tree (Germany above Prussia). A series is a design family within it, the Krugerrand or the Sovereign. A type is the unit of description: one design at one denomination and composition, carrying one full specification (fine gold, fineness, gross weight, diameter, thickness, shape, orientation, both faces and the edge, catalogue references). An issue is one year, mint and finish of a type, with its mintage. Mints cut across the tree, and a mint's page lists everything it strikes.

The catalogue is authored, not scraped. Each record is written from the mint's own publications and the standard references, and carries the Numista N# where the type is filed there so a reader can check it against the reference the trade uses. Numista's own data is not copied here.

Every type page also prints a melt value: the fine gold in the coin at today's spot price, in your display currency. It is stated as exactly that and nothing more. It is not a valuation, it carries no numismatic premium, and it is not a price anyone is asking.

Photographs are normalised too. Studio shots arrive from mints and archives against a dozen different backgrounds; lined up in a grid, the eye reads the backgrounds before it reads the coins. So every image is cut out and squared, credited to its source, and the site renders the processed version rather than hotlinking the original.

What it is not

It is not a dealer: nothing here sells a coin, and no price on this site is an offer. It is not a valuation service; melt value is arithmetic, and the premium a specific coin commands is a question for a dealer or an auction record. It is not a grading or authentication service, and no data here can tell you whether a specific physical coin is genuine. And it is not a forum; there is no community layer and none is planned.

For machines as well as people

The catalogue is available as a JSON API, documented at restrike.co/developers, and every page of this site is also served as markdown to any client that asks for it with Accept: text/markdown. That is deliberate. A structured catalogue whose whole value is that its fields are consistent should not be locked behind a rendering of those fields; if you want to compare two coins programmatically, you should not have to scrape a page to do it.

Contact

Corrections, additions and questions: hello@restrike.co. Catalogue corrections are the most useful thing you can send: say which type, which field, and what it should be.