Innehållsförteckning för January 2021 från Coins

During a recent visit to our local grocery store, I received three quarters in change. I noticed they were shiny and new looking; I assumed they were new 2020 editions and put them in my pocket. When I got home I laid them on my desk to look at later. That evening I finally took a close look at them and was shocked to see that they were Great Smokey Mountains, Tenn., quarters from 2014. And what shocked me even more was that they had “S” mintmarks! They were not proofs, mind you, but circulated issues from the San Francisco mint. I am still kicking myself for not paying closer attention to them while I was at the checkout. The cashier probably had a partial or maybe even full roll…

COLLECTING UNITED STATES copper is a part of our hobby that can take on many forms. Gathering cents from change, or trying to find the one-cent piece of the current year as early in the year as possible is a means of collecting, having fun, and doing it on the cheap.You just end up pulling coins from change. Collecting early large cents will certainly be a more expensive way to build a collection, but may be just as much fun. Trying to assemble a collection of our relatively brief series of 2-cent pieces also holds a certain allure. But what about the coins we might call “the cents before the cents?” What about looking into the field called pre-federal coppers? This too can be both fun and educational. Before the…

HAVE YOU ever wished you could go back in time and snag some rare coins at yesterday’s prices? When I started collecting, in the 1970s, I remember looking back at Standing Liberty quarter values from the decades prior and being envious. Besides that quarter series, there were plenty of earlier coins I would have liked to collect, but with an extremely limited budget that accompanied poor-paying jobs, I couldn’t. I imagine this is a common malady among beginning coin and paper money collectors. Still, we can always dream, and looking back on past times remains a fun pastime. In this column, we will go back in time, at least in terms of revisiting the earlier pages of a publication dear to my heart – Coins magazine, the first coin magazine…

The market for coins is not singular. For that reason, different sectors of this market may move in different directions. Values and prices realized in the scarce to rare market segment have continued to rise, in part due to an expansion in the amount of discretionary money chasing these coins and in part due to an increase in the supply of scarce to rare coins becoming available for sale. This appears to be feeding on itself, with more individuals with highly desirable coins being motivated to take profits now due to the success of many high-profile coins in recent auctions. The bullion and bullion-impacted segment of the coin market has been experiencing volatility. The spot price of gold and silver reached attractive levels, then more recently backed off these highs…

To clean or not to clean, that is the question. Ask almost anyone who has been a collector/dealer/investor in coins for a long time, and the answer will be: Don’t clean a coin. Now, ask that same person if he/she has ever cleaned a coin, and if the person is telling the truth, the answer will be yes. The correct answer is a bit more subtle than never clean a coin. It depends on such factors as the value of the coin, its current grade, its metallic composition, and what the “problem” with it is that makes you think it should be cleaned. A long time ago, I read a short tale written by a major coin dealer about a coin cleaning that netted him thousands of dollars. The man…

OLDER COLLECTORS reading this story may well remember that in the early 1950s it was still possible to find old silver half dollars, well circulated, that were called Barber coins. Because they were so worn there was little demand for such pieces and it was not until the 1970s that interest in this series became much stronger. The story of this coin goes back to well before its introduction in January 1892, however. Unlike today, when the half dollar is little used, in the 1870s it was one of our more popular coins and was struck in very heavy numbers at all three mints: Philadelphia, Carson City and San Francisco. On two occasions during that decade the yearly mintage at the parent mint itself was over 8 million pieces. Due…