- Have you had a Coin Collecting Epiphany?

JZrarities

Someone recommended that I post this to a new thread...

Sometime along my Coin Collecting career I had an epiphany.

If you are like me, one day you will realize that only the 'special' coins belong in your personal collection. If you look at a collection of Lincoln Cents, the coins that get the most attention are the Key Dates and the High Grade scarce coins.

After attending many Coin Shows I realized that the majority (99%) of older coins have been cleaned - even the slabbed ones. Coin collectors have preserved their treasures for more years than I have been around, and I decided to find those coins that they treasured. The main storage piece of older collections was the Coin Cabinet and early Wayte Raymond albums, and pieces stored in this way often exhibit the most beautiful natural colors. Finding a coin that still has this color and hasn't been cleaned or enhanced has been a pursuit that has kept this hobby exciting for me. I can go to a coin show with 50 dealers and only find 1 coin that was treasured by an older collector that still has it's original toning and has never been cleaned. It is hard to describe what natural album or cabinet toning is, but the coin will have THAT LOOK. I actually don't care what the grade is as long as the coin is 'special', has the right LOOK, and fit's in the Beautiful category. I have bought many Average, Plain and downright Ugly coins in my early collecting days,, and I always ended up hating them because every time I would look at such a coin, I would end up focusing on the 'Problems'. Many collectors that only collect White coins don't realize that their coin has at sometime been cleaned. Find me a coin that has the original color from sitting on an old collection, and you will easily get me excited.

From this epiphany I have been buying coins that have THAT LOOK. I guess you can say I am the ultimate World Collector, and when I find a coin like this it goes in my personal collection. My favorites go back as far as ancient Greece and Rome up to a 1967 Canadian Dollar with colorful rim toning from the original holder it was stored in. What my collection has become is an enjoyment personally to me. I can look at each coin and and get excited because it has that SOMETHING SPECIAL. Usually these special coins also have High Relief Strikes, Brilliant Luster under the toning, Die Breaks, or something else that can cause me to spend an hour with a Loupe just looking at each and every coin.

My collection isn't very large at about 200 coins, and it is only that big because I don't care what series it belongs to - only that it has THAT LOOK or has that SOMETHING SPECIAL. Eventually I would like to complete a 'set' of something, so to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I will classify my collection into the following broad areas:

- Ancient Greek beautifully toned silver staters by type (an Athenian Owl, Aegean Turtle, Corinthian Pegasus, Facing Heads of Larissa)
- Silver Tetradrachms from Alexander the Great (Cabinet Toned of course) and my one Gold Stater.
- Roman Denarii from all the Emperors and their Families - and my two Gold Aureii from 2 of the 12 Caesars.
- Hammered Silver and Gold pieces from 1200-1680 (especially Great Britain and other European countries, my icon)
- Austria/German States Thalers and World Crowns
- World Coins (Darkside) that have THE LOOK (if you've read this far) This covers everything...

- US Coins by Type (Originally Toned) especially Draped Bust, Proof Seated, Barber, etc.
- Large Size US Paper Money (by type), and Obsoletes, Colonials, Fractionals
- World Paper Money (darkside paper?) I'm just getting started...

I am truly thankful to have found this Board and met fellow Darksiders.
-Jeff

Aethelred

When I was about 14 I bought my first ancient Roman coin and a few weeks later my first medieval English coin, life has never been the same for me!

wybrit

As a kid I collected junk British coins out of rolls and filled up Whitman albums with them. The "epiphany," if one could call it that, was attending my first coin show in Denver a few years ago, realizing that Edward VII and George V actually had hair!!

SYRACUSIAN

Yes I had an epiphany, I joined the Darkside.

Sylvestius

Yes.

I was browsing the internet one day and a coin from Nazi Germany came up and i thought, wow i never even thought about on of those. So i bought a few off of ebay a few weeks later. Then i did a few trades on coinpeople and i totally drained the entire supply as i snapped up all i could get, so that i could get a low grade type set of sorts, as many mints, as many dates, as many denominations as i could get.

Then i thought enough larking about time to get serious and so i started a BU 5 reichspfennig date set of the Berlin (A) mint, i've got about a third of them already. If i can get them all i might shift onto the 10 reichspfennigs of Berlin, and do those. Then shift to the 50 rpf, the marks, the 1 & 2 rpf, and finally the silver 2 and 5 marks. If i still want i challenge i'll then move onto the next mint.

I'm kinda enjoying this set, it's got everything i'm looking for. Nice short time period, the currency depicts how the regime and the war affected the country. They're not particularly expensive (okay the 'bronze' 1 and 2 rpf ones with full lustre are). I also like the fact that many collectors' shun the series as a taboo one, fine it means there's more for me. Plus i can feel the history on these things, the history ain't nice but it's still history and you can't ignore it based on the fact that it's not viewable through rose tinted specticles.

1jester

It wasn't until I was given a Churchill Crown that I realized how exciting coin collecting can really be.

cosmicdebris

Is this the L@@K?

JZrarities

<Is this the L@@K?>

YES, That's the Look!

Beautiful coin....

rhound1977

I like that look too....... I especially like the nicely toned bronze and copper, which I posted about a while back.....
I even like the bright red one, but this is a color I realy like:

coinkat

SEVERAL... it is an experience I tell you

cladking

The most dramatic was when I was reading a little blurb in the Chicago Tribune in late '71 or
early '72 that said the mint and fed were switching to FIFO accounting. Before this it was ap-
parent that no one liked the post-64 coins and they weren't being saved. Still, it seemed a
waste of time and effort to collect them since it was common to see huge releases of old coins.
A pallet or ten of '68-D quarters had just been released in the Chicago area shortly before this
announcement.

The article went on to say that along with the change to FIFO accounting they had to rotate
their stocks of coins so that they were handled "first in, first out".

It was only a few years later that I also discovered world coins though this had more to do at
first with trying to locate silver cheaply.

BigAlan

Have you had a Coin Collecting Epiphany?

Yes, you can't get em all.

elverno

I've had two major ones.
The first one my wife gave me about 1980. She said "Are you out of your mind!?" or something close to that. I had just come through the door with my latest purchase, an 1809 French Hussar sabre. It hadn't occurred to me that my new collecting direction might not fit well into a tiny apartment with a baby and a second one on the way. She pointed out that sharp stabby things aren't usually a good idea with little kids and that long stabby things just cluttered up the house. "Why don't you collect Napoleonic coins or medals? I'll bet they're small..." (She has no defense!)
The second one was BigAlan's point. There's just not that many coins or medals that won't show up again. For those few you might have to mortgage the house but normally you use a phony French accent and say "C'est la vie!"

JZrarities

Here's my latest purchase from eBay. It hasn't arrived yet.

Original 1674 Italian Papal medal by Hamerani