I found this very interesting. I recently renewed my membership to the ANA after a many-year absence, and for the first time I decided to take advantage of the Numismatist online archives. I've been going through and reading some of the copies from the 19th century and some of what's in those early editions is fascinating! For example, I found this one statement by the original writer of his disdain for collecting series by dates. I quote in full: "We have frequent calls for the U.S. series of dates. We have our own good reasons for not collecting a series of dates. We believe in collecting only distinct varieties. The field is large enough and replete with a vast variety of beautiful and interesting designs and we see no necessity of a collector spending his time and money over an interminable series of dates. Stop the foolishness. If you want varieties we have them; don't ask us for dates for we are not in the fruit business." The Numismatist, January/February 1889, Pg. 11 Thing have certainly changed since then.
This is probably true of every collecting area. First it begins with "just get one of each", then as more and more folks start competing to have the best collection, more and more minute details are deemed collectible, even to the extent of collecting the mistakes that were made!
There are still plenty of collectors who do not collect by date and mint. Lots of them in fact, just one kind are known as Type Collectors. Then you also have people who collect like I used to, I was never a date/mint collector either. I used to collect coins just because I happened to like that specific coin, regardless of what date, mint, or even what denomination it was. And when I stopped collecting US coins and switched over to world coinage, the degree of my eclectic collecting actually increased. But I will grant you that in today's world the majority of collectors are date/mint collectors. Just not all of them.
Personally, I just collect by date. There are very few series where a full date/mintmark set are within an acceptable financial range. But I agree that most collectors today are date/mint. Of course the introduction of the original whitman coin folders probably set the precedent for many.
More than you might think. Notice the date of the article, 1888. That was five years years before Augustus Heation published his book on Mintmarks. Until that time pretty much no one paid any attention to mintmarks, and for the most part no one even knew what date and mintmark combinations existed. Even then collecting by date and mint did not become popular until the introduction of coin folders in the 1930's.
“...don’t ask us for dates for we are not in the fruit business” I love this. I wish more advertisements today had this kind of wit.
Early US collectors often didn't know about mintmarks, either. The ones that did collect by date often ignored mintmarks. When collectors did save coins by date, Proofs were often saved because they were the "nicest" ones for the date. Really, its a miracle anything before the 1890's survived in MS condition.
That is interesting. If you'll allow me some rampant speculation, I would imagine it was the old Wayte Raymond "penny boards" of the 1930s (the forerunners of today's folders and albums) which put date-and-mint collecting on the map, though there were certainly people trying to put together date sets of large cents in the 19th century. Edit- oho, I see @Conder101 already touched on this.
