Does your collection have a limit?

No limit. I just checked and I now have about 4450 coins which I have accumulated in the just past 3 1/2 years. I recently got back into coin collecting, it had been years since I got rid of all my "stuff". Some of my coins cost over $1000, most cost much less. I am into quantity rather than quality. I like my Zambia kwacha almost as much as one of my GB wreath crowns. Well, not really, but I still get a kick out of world coins, ancient Indian chunks of copper, and Morgan silver dollars. If I like a coin, then it can find a home here with me. I do not have to explain myself to anyone, just having fun with this here "hobby".

 

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Yes, that is a good suggestion. In my own circumstance we had a couple of brief family get-togethers to discuss what should be done about my coin collection and my web pages when I depart this “mortal coil”. I was taken aback when it came out that none of my family members other than Beverly were interested in becoming protective custodians of any of them (and not just sell them off). One of my grandson’s volunteered to keep a thumbnail drive containing the source code and images for each of my web pages so that they could be resurrected in the future (after I am gone) if someone wanted to do that.

As a result of those get-togethers Beverly and I agreed that I should keep just a few coins (and reference books) that are especially dear to me and that will enable me to keep on pursuing this life-long interest that I love so much in a meaningful way - hence my Twenty coins! I decided to consign most of the remainder of my coins (and books) to Auction and give the entire proceeds to Beverly as “mad money” to spend as she wished (actually to completely re-do the kitchen, etc. - you know how practical grandmas are). We don’t need the money because we are fortunate to own our home (having no mortgage is really great) and everything in it plus our automobiles - being debt free is good I had used CNG as my Auction venue on previous occasions (Victor England is an old friend) with satisfactory results but this time I opted to use CT member Severus Alexander’s Auction house and he did an outstanding job!

I am now a happy camper - I haven’t given a lot of thought as to what will happen to my twenty coins when I die - I will probably gift most of them to various close CT friends at an opportune moment - but I am not going to worry about that right now.

One interesting new development is that one of my grandson’s is showing interest in my coins of the English Civil War (Cavaliers & Roundheads) -
https://jp29.org/000stuartkings.htm a side collection that I “rat holed” (aren’t we all incorrigible ?). I do not know how this will play out.

 

Oh I am not a sturdy soul at all @medoraman - in my youth I never considered the size of my collection when I added coins to it. But when you grow old like me it assumes great importance when you contemplate your impending demise. Although it is a gloomy thought, most collectors have to face up to what is going to happen to all those coins when they die. If you are going to die alone in the world - or if you are furious with your family and do not care if they are going to experience great trauma in disposing of your coins - then do nothing. But if you are leaving behind a loving family or maybe cherished friends who you really care about and want to leave the coins or proceeds from their sale to them - then either sell off your coins when your end is approaching, or go through the procedures for disposing of them with the survivors you wish to benefit. (Doug Smith discusses this in another post and I reply to it in my proceeding post above). Reducing the size of your collection really helps here.

When you are young (pre-50?) this may sound unnecessary - even ridiculous - but as the old saying goes: “it is later than you think”! Your end date has a nasty habit of creeping up on you very quickly - it seems like I turned 60 only a very short time ago, yet here I am 90!

I have seen so many surviving spouses, family members and favored friends suffer great trauma due to well-meaning collectors failing to follow similar procedures to those I outline here - for all kinds of collections too - not just coins.

 

Most of us can only hope to reach 90! I raise a glass to your long and productive life.

 

Limits? Absolutely not! I approach collecting coins the same way I approach collecting anything else; like it's a superb buffet where I can gluttonously stuff myself to the gills with a little bit of everything!

While I often ignore the advice that "one quality item is better than 10 mediocre pieces" it's probably the only limit that is sometimes imposed.

Thankfully coins take up very little space relative to minerals/fossils, books, tools or general antiques so additional garages or storage units won't likely be necessary for them anytime soon.

 

I don’t know ... It might be in my lifetime. I think about selling part of collection to buy something else. I don’t know I what would do with the proceeds if I sold my collection. I don’t need the money. Some of my heirs don’t deserve anything because they are declared socialists. Socialists should decline inheriting anything.

It might end somewhere, but I am not old enough.

 

I currently have about 640 coins and I suspect that my limit is somewhere in the neighborhood of 720 to 760 coins. However much of my effort lately has been finding coins that replace coins currently in my collection that I am in one way or another less happy with. A case in point
Tetradrachm of Myrina 160-143 B.C. Sacks Issue 20 16.76 grms 35 mm

 

Funny that you came up with 200 as an arbitrary number. That just happens to be the Roman imperial set from Augustus to Romulus Augustus (my collection here seen as a grid snapshot http://www.tantaluscoins.com/coins/grid28.php)

I see a lot of gloomy posts here relating to liquidation. It's apropos of my likely last ever blog post that I published just the other day where I see the end of coin collecting itself drawing nigh:

http://dirtyoldcoins.com/Roman-Coins-Blog

Rasiel

 

I can relate. Sometimes it feels like yesterday that I was a young 18 or 19 year old college student, yet here I am aged 34, with more than 2 dozen gray hairs to remind me I'm not a kid anymore...and my son (whom not long ago was a toddler) is now a 9 year old kid whom can use a computer far better than I can.

Time is relentless, and our lives are but an insignificant blip in time in a universe that will still be here long after the Earth is consumed by our sun, and long after every star in the universe is extinguished.

Anyway, I for once I'm glad to have shared that small blip in time with you @jamesicus , as your posts have made my journey through this hobby a little more enjoyable. I hope you will still be around for many years yet.

 

Thank you for saying those nice things @Sallent - the sentiments are mutual.

 

I have no set limits on size of collection but my collection does change shape and size regularly. I will continue to grow the areas that I have a long term focus on. I will trim down the areas that I no longer have an interest in. Overall my focussed collection will continue to grow but my wider collection will likely shrink. My overall collection peaked at over 5,000 coins.

 

Ras, two points about your blog post. I agree about overall quality of uncleaned coins going down, but we knew that would happen. At some point, all fields have been searched.

Second, I think you are concentrating a little too much on the downsides of modern internet culture, while ignoring the upsides. Granted there are more things to do, but we are here on the internet able to learn and discuss ancient coins, something impossible without technology. I was one the earliest to be drawn in to ancient through technology, in the old Moneta-L days. I simply would not be an ancient collector without the internet. Additionally, it has never been kids who drove the future of this hobby. They may start, but then discover girls, cars, and start careers. It is 30-40 year olds, looking for a hobby, who have been the lifeblood of newcomers typically. The internet allows them to learn about this hobby, and participate here.

Without the internet, I think coin collecting, especially ancients, would be in far worst shape than it is.

 

Yep, that's about how it goes. When I was 12 I got into coins. By 17 I abandoned the hobby because I was more focused into getting into college....and girls, girls, girls. But what hormonal 17 year old isn't interested in the later? Anyway, I didn't get back into coins until age 22 when I graduated from undergrad, then abandoned it again at 24 when I started grad school, and didn't pick it up again until age 29 when I had some time and a little bit of discretionary income. The point is that it is hard to do a hobby when you have classes, exams, and are too busy trying to get a second date or third date from some girl you are head over heels for. When one is older, that's when a hobby starts to become a more serious pursuit.

Take another hobby as an example: How many 12 - 25 year olds do you see at auction buying a 1960's Mustang to fix and tinker with in their garage? Practically none, but there sure are plenty of 30-something to 40-something year olds looking for their first classic car to do just that. And the hobby is alive and well despite the average age of newbies being closer to 40 years old, and the average participant being probably in their mid to late 50's.

 

The size of my safe ? ... Nah, that didn't do it either .... have sets/coins in closets, in cabinets, desk drawers, and in the safe. I might have room for one more PCGS holder box, but it would probably have to go the wrong way blocking access to all the others. (bit of a coin horder, I guess). Oh, and we're still buying ... Should have bought the bigger safe ... but like computers ... nah, you'll never need more than a 20MB harddrive. The safe is a TL30-6 that is 60X30X24 outside dimensions. The next larger was 48 inches wide, but twice the cost.

 

I think maybe you guys misunderstood my feelings about the internet and so on. I'm about as hooked-in to the digital age as any millennial and see the Information Age as humanity's literally most important leap forward. My argument is simply that as opposed to the 1950's (or 1850's) collectibles as a hobby is on a steep decline precisely because there's so many other alternatives that are appealing as entertainment and without this new generation replacing the ageing, established one it's a foregone conclusion where we're headed.

When I was in grade school every other kid had a stamp or coin collection. Maybe not every other kid but certainly a significant percentage. I've spent a lot of time with my kids' friends over the years and not one single one of them, somewhere between a dozen or two, has collected anything at all that I can tell. I've shown many of them some coins and they unanimously they think it's cool and.... that's about as far as it goes. It's equivalent to me and Greek coins. I look at them and think wow, they're really cool looking. I appreciate their "oldness" and the incredible artistry and so on. But I don't feel the need to possess them. Without that spark the whole process of taking the next step never materializes. They might as well be items in a museum, to me no more worthy of lingering attention than a well-crafted vase or a medieval oil painting.

I wonder if the ACE coin cleaning program of a few years back, which supposedly reached many schools, made so much as a single kid take up the hobby. Have you ever seen a post where someone credits this having kickstarted their collection? In fact, my own company Dirty Old Coins sold thousands of coin kits between 2005-2010 and I can probably count on one hand the number of those customers who credit that as a starting point into their own ongoing interest in numismatics.

And it's, again, not just coin collecting. It's pretty much every other offline passtime. How many kids do you see nowadays raving about their ant farm, train sets or even board games like Dungeons and Dragons? If you have to think hard to come up with an isolated example you've proven my point.

Honestly, if I had had access to something like the internet and cell phones and video games as a kid back in the 70's I seriously doubt I ever would have picked up coin collecting. It's possible I would have later on in life, sure, but if you're not exposed to it in your formative years I think the appeal is much weaker. As a rhetorical exercise, in your most objective, detached assessment ask yourself if this might not be the case for you as well.

Rasiel

 

@rrdenarius Those large cast bronze are really neat!!
Do you have any of AES rounds with Janus or dolphins!

 

I just think you are jumping the gun some. Millennials are not yet 40. Like I said, that is usually the key demographic the hobby needs, people in the middle of their careers, with some money to spend, looking to fill some time.

I agree coin collecting is weakening for US collecting. But that is against the highest point it has ever been at in human history, so kind of a tough comp. Ancient collecting has NEVER been very popular in the US, it simply hasn't. We do not have the ancient history and ties that Europeans have. So those of us here are oddballs, we need to recognize that. We were the oddballs 50 years ago in the totality of coin collecting in the US, and still are.

However, in certain areas prices and collecting are through the roof. Ancient/medieval Thai collecting has never been more popular. I see this as the long run outcome, richer societies already have had their "run", and more developing societies will do the same as their wealth and education improve. So US collecting may wane some in this country, but I expect worldwide collecting to persist.

I guess I am too old. I remember all of the doom and gloom articles in the 70's how coin collecting will disappear in 15 years because not enough kids are collecting as used to. Same article reappears periodically for the last 40 plus years in the hobby. Yes, the hobby has changed dramatically, but I still see the exact same makeup at shows, a few kids, lots of (mainly) men from their 40-70s. I love seeing and helping the 40 year old "newbies" because to me THAT is the future of this hobby.

Just my opinion.

 

It is definitely NOT the case for me. I became interested in collecting ancient coins because of my love for history. Where did I get this from? I read thousands of books in the last 50 years. I started reading when I was just over 3 years old. Since then, reading has been a passion of mine. One that I luckily was able to turn into a career. As an academic I am able to access millions of articles on any topic that interests me. It also means that I can write on many topics. Collecting ancient coins appealed to me because it was yet another venue in which I could learn. I have also enjoyed writing about ancient coins. This satisfies my need to do research. I use the Internet for research and for recreation, but this has never distracted me from studying by reading. Collecting ancient coins gives me the opportunity to hold a piece of history. When this is supplemented by reading about the time period or the emperors on coins, it completes the picture for me.

 

Here is mine with Dolphins:

TRIENS AES GRAVE



Roman Republic
Aes Grave Anon 280-276 BCE
Triens 46mm 90.3g 9.3mm thick
Thunderbolt
-Dolphin
Rome mint
Crawford 14-3 T Vecchi 3

 

I have a few. The Janus head coins reduced in size as Rome ran out of bronze during the Punic Wars. The smaller coins have the prow headed left.

One of my favorites is the dolphin / star sextans shown below.

There is a dolphin / thunderbolt coin also.


You can see more at my blog -
http://rrdenarius.blogspot.com/