LordM newps summary, January 2018

January was an active month for me, since I had a little bit of "mad money" from the sale of my love token collection. I added five to the Eclectic Box collection and there are perhaps one or two more in the pipeline for February, but then I'll go back to being my usual impoverished peasant self.

Posting this group might be stealing a bit of thunder from my upcoming Eclectic Box update, but that might be delayed until I finish working on the long-overdue individual writeup threads for all of my now 32 coins.

It has been less than a year since I was keeping to a "Box of 20". Now that I no longer have that self-imposed limit of 20 coins, the collection is growing coinsiderably!

Here are the five I added in January. February's newps are likely to include at least one United States coin (there's a lovely classic US 20th century type coin in my crosshairs right now, but as of this post I'm a few hours away from knowing whether that's a done deal or not).

Greece (Thessaly, Pharkadon): silver hemidrachm; Thessalos restraining bull, ca. 440-400 BC



Greece (Mysia, Lampsakos): silver diobol; janiform heads and Athena, ca. 4th-3rd century BC



England: silver penny of King John, ca. 1213-1215, from the Gisors hoard found in Normandy



India (Mysore): gold fanam of Tipu Sultan, AH 1200 (1786), Patan mint



France: silver jeton (insurance token) engraved by Ernest-Paulin Tasset, 1869

 

Hi, Dave (and anybody else with similar thoughts).

You're in a good place here. Just express your interest on the Ancients forum here and you'll have lots of expert guidance. Several of our members are VCoins dealers, and that is a good place to buy ancient coins. (You'll want to avoid eBay until you know what you're doing, though taking a chance on some cheap stuff there is probably OK.) Forum Ancient Coins is another excellent place to shop, and their coins come fully attributed with lots of nice information on the pages and on the holders you receive the coins in.

I dabble in all periods of history so I'm certainly no specialist in the ancients, though I collected Roman coins a bit over the last decade. (In the last year or so I got increasingly into ancient Greek stuff.)

Ancient coins are a wonderful niche of the hobby, and they can be collected on literally any budget from just a few dollars (even as little as $5-10!) on up into the really expensive stuff. You do not have to be rich, and you don't even really have to have much knowledge to begin with. Everybody starts somewhere, and most of us (myself included) started out knowing practically nothing about ancient history or coins.

I think too many people are intimidated by the vast knowledge some ancient coin collectors have (you'll meet such encyclopedic people here- and I am not one of them.) But don't let that bother you. Nobody but nobody can "know it all", and everybody is in it to learn. You can just "take the plunge" and jump right in, with reasonably little fear of injury. Like you said, go low budget to start, and see where that takes you. The coins will teach you and suggest further paths to follow as you go along, and as you find out what appeals to you most.

PS- The Zander Klawans handbook is a nice, basic, affordable overview for the beginning collector of Greek and Roman coins, and it's put out by Whitman Publishing, so you should be able to even find it locally in the larger chain bookstores if you don't want to order it online.

The Wayne Sayles books are nice to have. You don't have to buy the entire set (though that's great if you want to.) To start with, you can just pick the volumes that interest you the most.

There are also a lot of great sources of free information on the Web. Our own @dougsmit's site is one such, and is hosted by the aforementioned Forum Ancient Coins.