Found a few vintage coin albums at Long Beach today-Dansco Continental, Wayte Raymond, mystery board

Mr_Spud

I found a few vintage coin albums that dealers were happy and eager to sell to me really cheap. The one I bought the Wayte Raymond Album and the blue coin boards from said how happy he was that I wanted them so he didn’t have to pack them up and haul them back home.

One was a put together mishmash of a Dansco Continental Morgan Album binder with foreign coin pages inside. Another was a Wayte Raymond album with several blank boards of different denominations.

And I found a whole bunch of boards the size of the smaller Wayte Raymond album boards, except they are blue and don’t have binder ring holes. The dealer said they are older than the Wayte Raymond albums.

I didn’t see any similar ones pictured in David Lange’s Book, but I’m thinking they are some kind of Beistle boards maybe. I’ll have to read David Lange’s chapters on the Beistle and early Wayte boards to see if I can find more clues. Does anybody have any idea of what exactly they are?

Here’s some pictures

The_Dinosaur_Man

Those are cool!

291fifth

I don't recall seeing those blue boards before. You might check ads in early issues of NUMISMATIC SCRAPBOOK magazine if you have access to any. Many coin supplies were advertised in that publication during the many years of its publication (1935-1976).

Mr_Spud

@291fifth Thanks, do you know if Numismatic Scrapbook is available to view online, like maybe at the ANA library? I just did a quick search on the ANA website and couldn’t find anything, but I only rejoined ANA a couple weeks ago and I’m not savvy with their resources yet.

johnny9434

I like the red one. I'd think that would make a cool looking book full, just saying

braddick

So cool!
(PM sent...)

lilolme

@Mr_Spud said:
@291fifth Thanks, do you know if Numismatic Scrapbook is available to view online, like maybe at the ANA library? I just did a quick search on the ANA website and couldn’t find anything, but I only rejoined ANA a couple weeks ago and I’m not savvy with their resources yet.

https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/publisherdetail/520106

Mr_Spud

Thanks @lilolme . When I checked out the link it said that because of copyright laws that only snippets from the magazine are available if you do word searches. I’ll still check out the snippets though, maybe I’ll get lucky with the right keywords 🌞

lilolme

@Mr_Spud said:
Thanks @lilolme . When I checked out the link it said that because of copyright laws that only snippets from the magazine are available if you do word searches. I’ll still check out the snippets though, maybe I’ll get lucky with the right keywords 🌞

Ouch, I did not notice that before I sent or would have warned. I have run across that with others (Coin World I believe I recall.....). Well that kind of reduces the chances of finding it elsewhere but one can never know.

CaptHenway

I don’t recognize those blue ones at all.

Mr_Spud

The closest thing I can find is that Beistle briefly made boards designed for some kind of file cabinets that didn’t have holes in them for binders, which Wayte Raymond later copied and called Rayway filing system. This was in David Lange’s book, but the book says they were Ivory colored but mentions that Colonel Green kept ordering them custom colored in brown. So, I don’t really know, but maybe someone ordered them custom in blue.

Here’s a few examples different sizes of the Rayway ones that I got off of eBay a while back. The Rayway ones don’t have the dark border tape, but Lange says that he couldn’t locate any pictures of the earlier Beistle ones and that he never saw them, just that he read about them in The Beistle Company archives. He wrote that they never became widely used and they weren’t promoted much so few were even made.

OldeTowneCoinShoppe

@291fifth said:
I don't recall seeing those blue boards before. You might check ads in early issues of NUMISMATIC SCRAPBOOK magazine if you have access to any. Many coin supplies were advertised in that publication during the many years of its publication (1935-1976).

Those blue boards look like they might actually be pages from the Wayte Raymond "Popular Album" album series. I have a few myself, and the pages have a strong tendency to separate. I have had to carefully glue back together most of mine.

Mr_Spud

@OldeTowneCoinShoppe said:

Those blue boards look like they might actually be pages from the Wayte Raymond "Popular Album" album series. I have a few myself, and the pages have a strong tendency to separate. I have had to carefully glue back together most of mine.

Thanks. So are your Popular Album pages blue and do they have the darker binder tape around the edges and with the binder holes punched into them like the ones I have pictured above? If so, that would be great new information. In David Lange’s book, he describes them as being the normal tan color but he also said he saw some prototype ones at The Beistle Company that were lighter in color with red printing. He also says they all had just a single celluloid slide allowing you to only see the obverse. Here’s some examples of some of the Popular boards that I got off of eBay a while back

rec78

I am an old album lover especially the early Dansco foreign albums. Very NICE!!!

rec78

WOWEEe!! Those Continental Dansco albums are expensive!!! Here are a few that just sold on eBay;

[https://ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=dansco+continental+album&_sacat=0&rt=nc&LH_Sold=1&LH_Complete=1]

davewesen

Do the mystery boards have removable slides?

I wonder if they were made by a collector for personal use, similar to what some have posted for Dansco page alternatives on these boards.

Mr_Spud

@davewesen said:
Do the mystery boards have removable slides?

I wonder if they were made by a collector for personal use, similar to what some have posted for Dansco page alternatives on these boards.

Yes, they have removable slides. They are the exact same size as the Wayte Raymond boards that fit into the smaller Wayte Raymond binders but they don’t have staples and they don’t have the binder holes punched into them.

They could have been custom made by either a hobbyist, like the hand made ones recently posted. Or they may have been custom ordered from Beistle, Raymond, Meghrig or one of the other imitators mentioned in David Lange’s book. I’m not finding any pictures or written descriptions anywhere that match these blue ones.

Namvet69

Very interesting. Thanks for showing the variety.

CaptHenway

@Mr_Spud said:

@davewesen said:
Do the mystery boards have removable slides?

I wonder if they were made by a collector for personal use, similar to what some have posted for Dansco page alternatives on these boards.

Yes, they have removable slides. They are the exact same size as the Wayte Raymond boards that fit into the smaller Wayte Raymond binders but they don’t have staples and they don’t have the binder holes punched into them.

They could have been custom made by either a hobbyist, like the hand made ones recently posted. Or they may have been custom ordered from Beistle, Raymond, Meghrig or one of the other imitators mentioned in David Lange’s book. I’m not finding any pictures or written descriptions anywhere that match these blue ones.

How is the quality of the slides? Are they good non-PVC plastic comparable to the Raymond album pages?

Mr_Spud

@CaptHenway The slides look to be good quality like the Wayte Raymond slides. They are rounded on the corners like the Wayte Raymond ones. I haven’t checked thoroughly on Meghrig slides, but on one I just checked on a Meghrig board aren’t rounded they are squared.

I also checked with a UV light and the Meghrig slides glow whereas the Wayte Raymond and the ones in the blue boards don’t glow. I remember reading that the older ones were made with celluloid and are highly flammable, but I don’t want to ruin a slide to check that. That’s why I checked with the UV light instead and surprisingly found the ones in the blue board don’t glow just like the Wayte ones.

Here’s pictures of the ones I just checked. The ones in the blue board are slightly wider in diameter than the Wayte Raymond ones, but otherwise appear the same . The one in the middle is Wayte Raymond, the one on the bottom is Meghrig

Edited to add new info - I just checked a newer Wayte Raymond board I have that doesn’t have the staple in the middle and it had squared off slides that glowed under UV just like the Meghrig ones do. I’m thinking that maybe the older ones that are rounded and don’t glow under UV might be the celluloid ones and the newer squared off ones that glow under UV are a different type of plastic. I’ll have to try and look up what the newer slides were made of in Lange’s book. I’ll update this post if I find a reference saying what they are made of.

davewesen

the rounded corners and the blue colors remind me of Whitman. Maybe those were experiments when they went from tri-fold to also include classic?

Mr_Spud

I found the info on what the slides were made of in Lange’s book. He said “transparent celluloid slides to permit viewing both sides of the coin (celluloid was likely replaced with acetate sometime after World War II, but these plastics are difficult to distinguish visually)”

So, I’m thinking the blue ones and the older Wayte ones with the staples have celluloid slides and the Meghrig and Wayte ones without the staples (which Lange’s book said were later ones) are acetate and that acetate glows under UV whereas Celluloid doesn’t based on what I saw with my UV light earlier.

Mr_Spud

I just noticed this reprint of an ad in Lange’s book that shows boards that look like my blue ones. The ad is black and white, so can’t tell what color, but this is the only picture I’m finding of boards the size of the the Wayte boards without binder holes and with the dark border like that. So maybe some were blue or custom ordered blue. Just maybe though, Lange’s book doesn’t describe any as being blue so can’t conclusively tell. Here’s the picture of the ad from Lange’s book

braddick

I think Mr Spud's answer to this mystery is correct in that ad from David Lange's book.
I've been doing a bit of digging too and if it ends up those are not the same pages, perhaps this is a solution:

At first I located these pages (note the color- although slightly different may easily be explained by the photo editing).

Further rooting around I see this ad and within it is the name of the company:

https://juliancoin.com/products/empty-lincoln-cent-set-crest-coin-pages-no-lc-i-only-pages-no-book

I then come upon the binder that holds these pages:

Although the pages shown by Mr Spud do not have binder holes in them and there is a black type border around them- Crest Coin Albums may have still produced them.

Mr_Spud

Yeah, I can’t really be sure of what I have. The border around the boards is dark navy blue, almost black but not quite. The color of the boards is blue-green, more blue than green. Close to what @braddick posted with the Crest album pages but a bit more blue. There’s no printing on any of them. I don’t think they are the Wayte Raymond Unique Coin Holders that were in black and white in the ad I posted, because I found another page with photos in color later on in David Lange’s book and they all have printing on them with the board number and the patent number, but there is also a smaller one for proof sets that is grey colored, so who knows? Here’s a picture of the page from David Lange’s book

The only other clue of what they may be in David Lange’s book is that Beistle made some unmarked ones that were the same size, and unprinted like the ones I have, but there is no mention of blue ones. It mentions custom colored ones made for Colonel Green but it says white. So who knows, Lange mentioned that many varieties of these ones from Beistle are not known to still exist. Here’s the paragraphs from David Lange’s book that talks about them.

So, hard to tell what they are. Might be some prototype or knockoff, or they might be some of the old Beistle ones maybe.

braddick

Here is one that I own. It is a light pastel yellow. It too has no markings on it.

Mr_Spud

I doubt I’ll ever figure out exactly what the blue boards are. But after doing all this research, I realized I can organize my Wayte Raymond boards in a 8x5 index card file just like the old Unique Coin Holders were meant to be stored.

So I found some inexpensive card files on Amazon and started organizing my boards. Here is a picture of most of my Wayte Raymond boards in order by the Wayte Raymond board number that’s printed on their reverse.

Just like the OG.

I’m going to need another file box for my Meghrig boards. But this is great, now I can easily see which I have versus which I don’t have. I also ordered some poly bags, I’m going to put each one in its own unsealed open ended poly bag and put them back in the file boxes. I read that open ended unsealed poly bags are the best way to preserve these. I’ll also get hold of some index card organizer thingys with the tabs so I can make an index of the Wayte Raymond numbers so I can find them quicker.

So organized, like an OCD dream come true 🤓

CaptHenway

@davewesen said:
the rounded corners and the blue colors remind me of Whitman. Maybe those were experiments when they went from tri-fold to also include classic?

An interesting thought.

davewesen

Here is a link to Beistle's patent that Wayte Raymond bought

https://patents.google.com/patent/US1719962A/en