Coin collecting before the Internet?

Being 29, I have grown up essentially having access to the Internet, Ebay, Craigslist, and numerous other methods to find collectables that might have been previously thought to be a 'rare' item. I am curious how the internet has presented many more fine specimens of coins and currency and the overall method of the hobby. How did we previously collect coins? Did we only have local coin shops and whatever they had was what we could get? I see Littleton has a presence, but looking through the weekly mailers I would be insane to make even one purchase. Was this the 'go to place' prior to the World being interconnected with ethernet cables and Cisco switches? If you collected prior to the Internet, how did you find the coins to complete your collections?

Just a little Friday night thought

 

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I just went to my local store and got coins that I could afford. They also had a coin club and the meetings were at the park which was across the street. The place closed a few years into collecting then I lost interest.

It was thanks to the internet that got me back into them and this forum for ancient coin interest.

 

Local coin shops
Local coin clubs
Local, Regional, & National coin shows

Much was purchased via the mail.
The ANA helped keep law & order in the transactions.
It was all fun.

 

BTW, hunting for a particular coin was much more difficult than it is today. Before the Internet & computers, the lists were updated manually and you had to find the coin for which you were looking within available dealer lists of inventory. Some dealers purchased printed ad space & others would mail their clients their lists. Mail bids & coin shop bid boards were the thing. Sorry you missed the fun.

 

I started collecting out of pocket change from my grandma back in the late 60's with my father. Never could afford the local shop back then. Then it was ordering from the US mint. I have only been going to the local shop since the early 2000's. From there I started using the internet. Most on ebay was bullion - I prefer a few a few trusted dealers.

 

It was much more labor intensive and more expensive to collect prior to the advent of the internet. Your choices for sales or purchase were largely limited to local shops, local clubs or local coin shows. The other major venue for purchases was through monthly magazines or weekly journals. As you might expect, doing mail order through these could yield some less than stellar pieces and returning the pieces would become expensive and time consuming when the returns were lost in-house. Nearly all transactions were also done at that time by personal check or cash.

 

I can imagine purchasing a coin strictly from a text listing telling the grade was a lot more difficult versus today when we have high definition photos of even low grade coins.

 

Yeah, I can only imagine. I grew up in the same era of coin collecting as you. The internet indeed has made it so much easier to buy or sell a specific coin.

 

Actually, you would have to be like 22 to have had fully grown up with Internet. Most people did not have Internet before the mid 90s. Even then most people didn't have Internet till the turn of the century. Internet has actually been around since around 1970 but only scientists, programmers, and the military had access and ease of use was certainly not what it is today. People still buy coins at local shops and shows and I assume it was like that, people doing things face to face.

 

Mail bid/order, shows, garage sales.

 

I bought from mail order from four dealers that I
trusted. Boozer & Weaver were by far my favorite
but they disappeared. One month I didn't get a
price list from them. Looked in CoinWorld and no
ads. I never found out what became of them.

And then there was grading. In 1979 a coin was
MS67 if no one threw it through a fan.

Coin Dealer News Letter was restricted to dealers.

So yeah, a lot of it sucked.

 

Yeah, I wondered what it was like collecting before the Internet as well. I also imagine it was a real pain to collect prior to the PCGS being established and the slabbing of coins.

 

Shoot. I was just a collector in isolation before the internet. Now I've all these resources.........and friends who save my bacon.

 

Local and regional coin shows, in addition to the local coin shop across the street from the Carson City mint. What was also fun was raiding the casinos for any for silver, I remember the dealer chip trays had full rows of halves and you can usually spot 5-10 of the pre-1970 silvers at any given time. Ah, those were prosperous times...sigh

 

I read an anouncment in Numismatic Scrapbook around 1975 about the Lincoln cent BIE Guild and what they collected (die breaks in LIBERTY mostly). I remember being amused
about it: "dudes get real." Twenty years later I became fascinated with them but never
found even one dealer at shows that had any. That's one of the big ways the Internet has
changed things: you can collect the most obscure things. Geeks un-plugged, yeah! :hail:

 

I first started collecting as a very young child in the early 1970s. My brother, six years older, either subscribed to or frequently bought one of the big-name coin magazines. I remember the back being full of classified ads. That's where I learned the term "SASE" (self-addressed stamped envelope). I don't remember prices, but I remember a lot being set up as trades, or priced in terms of silver coinage -- "one WL half for 60c silver + SASE", things like that. (You were charged by the line for ads, so they were VERY terse.)

I remember going to one local coin show in that era, and being completely blown away by the spectacle. ALL those SHINY coins! (I think I remember one guy whizzing coins while-you-wait.)

 

Can hardly forget the hours/days fun searching through wheat cent bag of 5,000 "unsearched ' pennies we had ordered from add in coin world. we estimate the coins to have been search 5 thousand times before we bought them. they said there was one key date and sure nuf , there was ONLY one poor old key date coin in the batch.

 

Was the "un-searched" bag from the "estate of an quaint
country gentleman?"