Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i Coins

I work at a casino and have just started collecting in the last six months and have almost completely filled a 1938-1964 Jefferson book and have found nearly four ounces total in silver plus around 20 Buffalo nickels. My favorite finds so far are a 1941-S Mercury dime and a dateless Standing Liberty quarter. Ryan S. Mount Vernon, Wash. I have recently been hunting bags of Ike dollars. I have been able to order from a bank near me. I have hunted about eight bags so far and have been able o find the following: Three 1921 Morgans (two “S” and one plain; Six Peace dollars (two 1926-S, one 1924-S, 1922-D, 1923 plain and one 1923-S); Two Blue Ikes; Five Brown Ikes (including one Bicentennial silver Ike proof), and One…

IN 1982, former actor Ronald Reagan was president, and some of his fellow actors died during the year. Well-known contemporaries of Reagan who passed included Henry Fonda and Ingrid Bergman. Grace Kelly, who gave up acting to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco, died in a car crash. Writer John Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Rabbit Is Rich. In the novel, Rabbit, the central character, speculates in gold and silver, buying Krugerrands as well as other coins. The book is set in 1979. Numismatically, of course, 1982 marks the return of U.S.-produced commemoratives. Fittingly enough, the first of these honored the 250th anniversary of our first president, George Washington. Since that issue, there have been commemoratives galore, many clads, some silver, some gold, and at least one in…

Stocks are down. Coins are stable. Shouldn’t we be celebrating? The price of coins, be they of gold, silver, or other compositions, became one of the few stable commodities or investments during November and December. The spot price of gold touched a new five-month high during the tumultuous stock market session of Dec. 10 but failed to rally sufficiently to drive investors into the coin market. The Numismatic Stock Index of publicly traded U.S. numismatic related companies continued the decline that started in November 2017, dropping from 62.6 percent of their 52-week high to 55.8 percent. Foreign companies tracked by the NSI have proved to be steadier, trading at 67.5 percent as compared to 66.46 percent one month and 65.5 percent two months earlier. Sotheby’s declined from 68.3 percent to…

When I started collecting coins in the 1950s, I bought a couple of Lincoln cent albums. They were the blue kind with three pages and a paper backing for the coins. The backing had stripes of some sort of glue to hold coins down that were too worn to stay in the holes. Unfortunately, if you left the coins in the album too long, the glue would impart parallel stripes to the reverses of the coins. Not long after I got started, I purchased (or my parents bought as a gift) the latest edition of A Guide Book of United States Coins (a.k.a. the Red Book). This I pored over, memorizing mintages, because there wasn’t a great deal of text to study in my 1958 edition. My impressions about how…