Silver

In the refrigerator change box at work today, right on top: a well-worn 1956 Canadian quarter, .8000 fine silver. That makes the second silver quarter I've found in the past few months.

Coin Show

Last weekend’s annual Fall coin show seemed to be a success. I don’t know how things were on Saturday, but Friday went well, for the time I was there. I worked from the time it opened, at 10:00 a.m., until 1:00 p.m., at the front table. We handed out name tags to dealers, prompted visitors to put on name badges, and sold raffle tickets.

There were about fifty dealers and eighty tables, and the venue was spacious. I could have spent much more time and money if I’d had either. As it was, I spent 1 ½ hours and $20.

I had to return in the afternoon after work to take back one of the coins I purchased, for I became convinced that it was a counterfeit. I wish I’d taken a picture of it so that I could show people what I was talking about. I was a little excited when I first found it: In one dealer’s binder of world coins, he had a couple of pages of 18th and 19th Century reales and half-reales. I’ve been looking for such a coin from the 1730s, because that’s the kind of coin that would have been in common usage in the Colonies when the first Tablers came over during that decade. I spotted a 1737 half-real for $18.95, and the dealer said he’d let me have it for $15. It wasn’t in great shape, but that was a good price, so I purchased it.

When I got back to work I looked at it a few times, and became troubled. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this was a replica. Finally, I became sure that it wasn’t just a fake, it was a poorly done fake that screamed “I suck.”

The details on the coin were poor. There was metal between the bars on many of the letters. Importantly, there were bubble-like raised nodules of metal, which is what would occur if the coin were cast in a mold that had bubble-holes in it that had formed when the mold-making material had set. Most damning, there was a broken flange of metal protruding from the top edge of the coin from where the metal had been poured into the mold.

At least, this is what my eyes told me. (For anyone reading this who doesn’t know, all those hints of the coin being cast in a mold are important because legit coins are not cast in molds.)

I took the coin back, explained to the dealer my concern, and handed it to him. He looked at it with his loupe and mentioned something about the quality of the coins at that time varying considerably, and then he gave me my money back. So I have no problem with this dealer, except that I think it was a seriously problematic coin that he himself should have caught. There were a few other world coins I bought from him that I’m satisfied with.

The best deal of the day: In found a 1960 Franklin half in nice shape marked with a price tag for $10.00, and a 1971 Eisenhower dollar that was sort of worn, marked at $2.00. However, both of these were in a bin marked “half off,” making the Franklin half = $5.00 and the Ike dollar = $1.00. I thought, “A dollar for a dollar? I’ll bite.” I took both of them over to the dealer, and he said, “I’ll just take five for both.” So, essentially I got the Franklin for $4.00, which is significantly below today’s bullion value for the silver in the coin.

Saturday morning I went to the St. Regis Park city-wide yard sale with Kim and Mom. I obtained three items, two of which were purchases and the other of which was a freebie. First, I bought for a dollar a little three-pronged gardening fork thing. Second, I was given a bunch of plastic poker chips. Thirds, I bought a 3-ring-binder slide-holder page of coins and little bits of junk for fifty cents.

The coins and junk—it really, really is junk—was a good deal. Nothing actually valuable, but there are several eastern European coins (Yugoslavia and Turkey, mainly) that I could put in my collection. There are also three Office of Price Administration rationing tokens from WWII, and one or two more tokens I have not identified. As for the junk: One rabies vaccination tag that I think is from the 1960s, a campaign pin which I’ll have to look up but I suspect is from when Bert Combs and Julian Carroll ran for Governor and Lt. Governor in 1971 (Thanks, Wikipedia!), a pair of cufflinks, and part of an earring or something.

The poker chips I got for use with various games, but my main intention is to use them for D&D. I won’t go into it unless someone asks*, or until I turn this into a roleplaying game blog, which could happen some day. I was standing at a yard sale looking at the poker chips in a cookie tin, wondering what the price was, when a lady walked up as said, “You want those? Just take them. Let me find you a bag.”


*For David and Aaron, since I know you read this and probably are wondering: The chips will replace those colored index cards.

At the Louisville Coin Club meeting on Sunday, a gentleman who was sitting in front of me struck up a conversation. He asked me what I was interested in—that’s the general ice-breaker question among coin collectors. What do you collect? What do you focus on? It’s a question that’s a little awkward for me to answer, because I have little money to spend on collecting, and my interests are so varied. I’m not much on being a completist, like many numismatists. Key dates—those coins that are rarest in a series—are usually well outside my price range. I don’t have a key date of anything. But this is actually a digression.

My answer to that question now is that I’m most interested in the detective work. My favorite thing about coins is when I get something that sort of stumps me, and I have to look it up to identify it. I find it a lot of fun to find a coin and have little or no idea what it is, and then have to hunt around for information on it. This always ends in some new little window opening for me on some other culture or bit of history. Ancient Roman coins bore plenty of political propaganda. That Indonesian coin I have depicts a congklak game board, which is a version of mancala. The four small pictures on Icelandic coins are depictions of Iceland’s four guardian spirits—dragon, bull, vulture, and giant.

In regards to being a completist, I have almost finished a complete set of business-strike Kennedy half dollars. I’ve been pulling them from circulation, so that means that they each cost me fifty cents. The only one I still need is a 1988-P, which is ridiculous, because it’s not a rarity at all. It had a huge mintage, but for some reason none of the hundreds of coins I’ve searched in the past year has been that one. The only coins of the series that I had to spend money on were the 1987-P and 1987-D, which were available only in mint sets and not released into circulation. I bought those a couple of years ago. Besides finding that one coin I’m lacking, I need to keep searching for better examples of the ones I have that are pretty beat-up.

At the coin club meetings there is always an auction at the end. Last weekend I noticed an old Whitman folder of Lincoln cents, 1909-1940, missing only key date coins. All the coins were worn; I doubt any would grade higher than Fine. But there were many coins there that I needed for my collection. I decided that I’d gladly buy that if I could get it for less than $8.00. Unfortunately for me, one of the club members brings his young son (or maybe grandson, I don’t know.) Nobody really wants to get in a bidding war with a five-year-old. He got the Lincoln cents for $6.50. A little sad for me, sure, but also very cute.

If you’ve read all of this post, you are either crazy or interested in coins. Not that the two are in any way mutually exclusive. Why don’t you just go read the sports scores or the blog of someone totally hot? Obviously, I just write this for myself. And that one guy someplace who Googles the terms “congklak” and “guardian spirits.”