I have been holding onto old and unusual coins since I was a kid (halves, mercuries, buffalos, barbers). I started paying more attention to my coins within the past few years, and I believe I am at the point where I have one big collection instead of several little collections. I have most of my coins in the cardboard flips with some of my prized coins in plastic slabs (flying eagle cents, carson city dimes and morgans, large seated liberty coins). I am planning to put the cardboard flips into binders, but I'm having trouble deciding on how to organize them. Should I put the coins together by size (dimes, quarters, halves) or by series (seated, barber, mercury, standing, walking)?
Size and date. My collection in binders starts with the largest denomination, earliest date. Example: Morgans, 1887-O, 1904-O; Peace 1922, 1925-S; Halves: Seated 1853-O; Barber 1913-S, 1915; Walkers 1916-D and such and so forth.
I also have a similar problem. I have hundreds of foreign coins (from loads of countries) in 2x2s that I am going to put in plastic binder pages, but how should I organize them? Should I do it by continent, e.g. Africa: Algeria, then where the Algerian coins end I would pick up with the next country? The problem with that would be that if I added a coin to a country, I would have to organize the whole continent. Any other suggestions?
You could use 3-ring binders so that as one country or continent grew you could just insert new pages rather than having to shuffle everything around. Search for "coin binder" on Amazon and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Sorry, I was a little unclear there. I meant that I will put them in a coin binder, but your idea does make sense. I might just devote a whole row to each country. Thanks for your help!
Another idea would be to sort them by era. All capped busts, then seated designs, then Barbers, Morgans and liberty nickles. For the early 20th century, buffalos, mercs, slq's and walkers would go together.
I actually organize mine by series. One binder for Indian/Flying eagle (1/2" is fine). One for Lincoln cents (go big with this one). One each for Buffaloes and Jefferson nickels. Etcetera. Organized within the binders by date and mint mark. I use the Avery Durable View Binders. You can insert labels, and change them out as the collection grows or shrinks. I found as my sets grew, I needed thicker binders, but was then able to reuse the smaller ones as I added additional series. One bonus... I found that the boxes the paper for our cardiac monitors comes in is the perfect size to hold two rows of 2x2 flips. Free storage medium.
Thanks for the opinions. I like the idea of the organizing the series from earliest to mid 1900s. My company doesn't ship our monitor paper in their boxes. We place our orders and they put the stuff into pillow cases and try to hot-drop at our usual ERs. I have a binder for my cents (2 flying eagles, about 16 indians, and wheats), and a binder for my modern coins (birth year, bicentennials, Sacs, SBAs...). I just couldn't decide how my other binders should go.
I started by sorting by denomination, but as the collection grew I then sorted by series and denomination (nickels, then Buffalo, Jefferson, and V) in separate binders. Check on what they do with the boxes. My company has a central station that supplies the others. Not only do they ship by the box to the individual stations, they also "recycle" the boxes to pack small supplies when sending a large order. Check the ER's as well, as they probably toss them when empty. All our monitors use the two inch wide paper, ten rolls to a box. Perfect size for two rows of 2x2s.
