Ohio State Coin Show March 24-26 in Columbus

TheRaven

I am surprised to see no mention of this coin show on this page today.....

WTCG

I will not be there, but plenty of the dealers in the midwest I know of plan on attending for at least one day.

Bothuwui

I was there today. Smaller than previous years. I imagine many of the dealers are waiting for the Central States show in Columbus next month. I got some pretty decent deals on coins, everyone seemed willing to negotiate. Picked up a 28 Peace in AU, and a couple of NGC proof Mercs. I hadn't realized that I had started collecting proof mercs until I bought them. Now that I have 3, I want to get the other 4 to have a full set! the rest of my purchases were to fill in some holes in a few sets, nothing much to talk about, few buffalos, few more Peace dollars, some lower grade type stuff. I did see Conder101 there, so maybe he can provide a little more info. I heard a couple dealers mention that it was kind of dead their. Maybe the collectors are saving up for next month too.

TheRaven

I am saving up for next month, but still going to drive the 2 hours for the show.....

Have to get going soon.....

TheRaven

I was at the show saturday afternoon from noon to about 4 and it was semi-busy I would say. A lot of dealers where packed up and gone by 3 or so, which drives me nuts.....

Got the definite feeling that people where saving their bullets for the show next month.....

Was able to pick up 7 nice Barber Quarters and a nice Barber Half for my sets, lots of Barbers there, but especially the Halves where cleaned or had some other problem with them..... Looking for nice VG coins can be tough, higher grade Barbers I think you basically needed to look at a different show.....

Observations from the show, NGC Gold seemed to be all the gold that was there, PCGS was outnumbered badly in cases..... Morgans everywhere, even more then normal I thought and a fairly young crowd, being 28 it seems I am the youngest one there lots of time, not this time.....

A dealer had 1955 Mint Sets sealed in original mailing envelope, very sweet and rare with a price to match.....

curly

I was there Saturday. A new mamber mentioned the show in an earlier post. Didn't buy much, just a few silver dollars. Saving for the Central States show.

Conder101

I was there Friday, Saturday, and for about a half hour Sunday. Friday seemed busy. There was a decent crowd there most of the day and the dealers were busy. I had a pretty good day. I picked up a recent PCGS slab that I didn't have yet, found a new NGS slab variety, picked up three new ANACS slabs so I now have all four varieties they have issued since the first week of February. Talked with the ANACS people for awhile to nail down the order that the new varieties came out in and found out at least one of the differences between the Prototype that they displayed at FUN, and the one actually issued in February. And finally I found a slab from another old company that I have never seen before. New fly-by-nights are turning up with depressing regularity, but discoveries of old companies are rare. I don't think I've seen more than a half dozen old companies that aren't listed in the book. This one is International Grading Services Incorporated IGSI. It uses small ACG style shells and from some of the features of the shell I believe they came from ACG's California offices. That plus the general style of the slab's label would place the date of this company sometime around 1987 to 1989.

Dealers started leaving the show early though. At least half a dozen left Friday afternoon. The neighboring dealers spread out tocover the now empty tables but it did make the show look a little "thinner" Saturday morning.

The crowd was a little thinner on Saturday but still seemed active during the first two hours. After that I can't say because I took in the three educational lectures that were presented.

Beth Deisher on Amos Press'es new book on grading "Making the Grade" with discussions on how it was created etc.

Mark Kimpton, on Clashed Morgan Dollar Varieties, a well done presentation that resulted in my adding another book to my library even though I don't collect Morgans.

And the third one was on Canadian Colonial Tokens. This could have been the best of the three since the presentor, whose name eludes me at the moment, obviously knew his field and has an extensive collection of above average quality pieces with which to illustrate his talk. Unfortunately he was not well prepared for the presentation and he tried to force too much material into it. This resulted in a rushed presentation with the images of the tokens each being shown very briefly and not adequitely discussed. Little more than "Here's this one, and this one, and this is, etc". The images also left something to be desired. The photography quality was excellent, but the images were too small, only about a tenth of the available area of the "slide" (Powerpoint presentation) with the slide title being the only other thing on the screen.

He had enough material that if he were to break the talk down into the different series, polish his presentation a little and increase the image sizes he would have three or four really first rate talks there.

When I came out of the lectures about 3:30 the bourse was dead wih not much more than the dealers there and some of them were packing up.

I came in briefly on Sunday morning because we had to see one dealer due to a mix up on a purchase, and at least half of the dealers from the previous day were gone. (This was at 10:00 when it opened.) With that kind of Sunday, I would not be surprised to see the Sunday dropped next year. I'm not sure that will help though. Like I said at least six dealers packed up Friday. I have been seeing that as a growing trend. Shows used to be OK on Saturdays and dead by shortly after noon on Sunday. Now they are starting to wither on friday and are dead by Saturday afternoon. More and more people are coming in as early birds on Friday morning or Thursday setup so the dealers have done their dealer to dealer business and are ready to leave by Friday evening. Many shows have responded by chopping Sunday. How long until they chop Saturday? At least one New York show this past year was a Thusday- Friday only show. "Who needs working stiff collectors that can only make it on the weekends? We'll just do the dealer trade and wealthy collectors who can come during the week so we can have our weekends off too."