The One Peso Hierarchy in the July 2026 PCGS census: King, Queen, Former Queen and the 1911-s Back in September 2021, at the tail end of a very long blog, we made a bold claim. We called the 1905-S Straight Serif the new Queen of the Pesos. Then, with the confidence of someone who had just crowned a coin on his own blog, we promised to return in three years to see whether the crown still fit. That was five years ago. Life happened. Other obsessions happened. But the promise stayed, and so did...

A study examined forty-three lots, thirty-two published prices, and one lesson about what the national hero is really worth at auction to attempt to answer the question: Is Rizal a good investment? (Updated October 3, 2026. After this post went up three days ago, Ambeth Ocampo wrote to us about the Boustead copy of the Noli. Its ₱500,000 sale in 2004 is now part of the count, and every figure below reflects it.) (Updated again October 4, 2026. In the spirit of completeness, which is something...

Most of what we know about GOMBURZA comes to us secondhand. A paragraph in a textbook. A line from Rizal on a museum wall. A courtroom scene dramatized for TV, and, of course, the movie GOMBURZA that came out in 2023. Even serious historians usually work from someone else's citation of someone else's archive — history filtered through however many hands it passed through before reaching them. This isn't that! What we are holding is a physical copy of Renacimiento Filipino, Año I, Núm. 38,...