Coin Collecting BEFORE internet...

Very good question and stories.
I had a Spectrum clone back in the days and I was loading games from tapes (floppy disks were something I dreamed about, I was wondering how cozy it is to load a game in 20 seconds, seemed unbelievable). Wish I'd see a 15 years old gamer play his games like that
I was born in 1985 and started collecting in 2012-13 (although I had a few coins and banknotes from early childhood, but nothing older than 1970). I first saw an ancient coin in 2015 and started collecting them in 2020. So i don't have any pre-internet stories to share at all.


But yes, for me collecting and especially ancient coins collecting would be impossible without the internet. 99,99% from what I know in this area is from the web. Forums, articles, numismatics.org, RPC online, tesorillo and many other sites where I find new knowledge almost daily.

I also buy all my coins from online auctions. I don't know any ancients collector in person, I rarely see coins on numismatic fairs (I think once every 2-3 years), and when I do, they are poor shape and very expensive ("it's 2000 years old, do you think 100$ is exepensive?" well, yes.)

 

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I could not imagine buying coins without the internet; this hobby would become incredibly difficult without it. Of course being 25 this year the internet has been around my entire life! (Even if I never used it until my teenage years).

I do not know if I could have bought unseen coins like some members have described in those printed price lists. I like to know exactly what I am getting and a textual description would not have satisfied my desire to see before I buy! Furthermore, I am only aware of one physical coin store near me that sells ancient coins (and even that is almost an hour and a half drive into the city). Without being able to buy online my collection would be a lot smaller, although, I suspect would contain coins of a higher average quality than I have haha.

 

So here's my story:

I probably never would have collected if it weren't for the internet. These days, it's the umbilical cord that connects me to the bigger world beyond the mountains. (And with Covid and travel-restrictions the physical world gets really, really small, as you all probably know).

I have never been to coin-shows, brick & mortar shops, or any other venue because there are none here. The only exception is a house-call to GIN (Germania Inferior Numismatics, a very nice and knowledgeable guy btw) two years ago when was I visiting family in the Netherlands. So, for now at least, internet is my only connection to numismatics.

In a way, I envy all pre-internet collectors who have or had a house-dealer. True: internet is high-res, instantaneous and worldwide, but there's something missing. You may pay a premium for what you buy from a dealer, but it's probably well worth it in terms of the shared knowledge, answered questions, advice, and a lot more. And then the simple human interaction, of course.

But for now, the only coins I hold or physically see are the ones dropped off on my doorstep, thanks to the internet. One button worldwide. Small world indeed. But I certainly wish this Covid-b.... was finally over and we all could enjoy the bigger world again. See a Greek temple, meet friends, visit a city I've never been to...

On a more cheerful note: here's a picture of my first computer:

Low-tech, hi-fi, and virtually indestructible.
And, appropriately, a Hermes.

I wrote my first stories on it when I was six or seven years old (more banged out. Try that with a Mac!). When they were young, my absolutely it. They had never seen anything like it; a mechanical computer! They could sit and bang on it for hours on end, producing sheet after sheet of garble. Pressing down the hammers one by one as fast as they could without jamming the machinery was a favorite (of course a really good, big jam is an even better result!). And does anyone remember that satisfying 'pling' just before you got to the end of the line?

For all the blessings of computers, I sometimes really miss the analog world...

 

My numismatic mentor is a gentleman from Germany, 63 years old. He taught me a lot of secrets, sold me a lot of coins (unfortunately NOT ancients as he is not interested in this area, only modern coins). When he was an active collector, in the 80s, he was buying (exceptional) coins from the US. The process was - some coin dealers he knew mailed him (MAILED, not eMAILED) catalogues with the current offer. Without pictures. Just coin, grade, price. He mailed back requesting more details and pictures (if needed). After they agreed, the US dealers sent him the coins via mail. Once he sent the payment ... via mail, 1000 DM, cash. Dangerous even nowadays.

I admit I can't start to understand this. Today I see an auction, on the other side of Europe, I study the coin pictures carefully, I read about it (10 minutes and 3 mouse clicks), I have an idea about the rarity and the price I can offer.... I win if everything goes well, I refresh the track and trace website 3412234 times in the next 3-4 days and I add it in my album.

Probably I would still be a modern coins collector without the internet, even if definitely my collection would be smaller. But ancients, no. No materials available offline for me (the ones I have offline were mostly downloaded) and certainly no place to buy them (coins) offline.

 

The storage system at the GEICO home office in 1970 was called microfiche. (Spelling?)

 

Without the Internet and CT most of my collection would be Fakes.

 

The 80286 PC was a MONSTER machine when it came out! I could run Windows, then was able to upgrade to 2.0! (Yeah, I know the Mac, but business software started to grow, and there was so many more available,)

 

LOL, same class here! The electrics were in the advanced typing class. We were not allowed to go near them, let alone touch them.

I was hopeless. My average was around 12 WPM. I believe 16 WPM was to pass the class. 21 WPM was a C. My teacher was kind, and desperate to help me pass, seeing my frustration all semester. I barely made it.

What I thought would be an “easy” course was a terror train for me!

 

It's been decades, so I can't remember the details, but I took typing in either junior high school or high school. I can't even remember which building it was in, much less individual things that happened during that class.

I do remember that we used IBM electric typewriters and that I had an old Royal manual typewriter at home. There weren't very many boys in the class, though, because it was the pre-computer era and most boys thought shop class was more fun and interesting.

I had taken piano lessons since I was about 8 years of age so typing came fairly naturally to me, having trained my fingers to move where I wanted them to go in rather rapid succession.

Typing class was one of the most useful that I ever took.

 

I remember waiting for my NFA Auction catalogues. I would pickout coins that I could afford/ fill out my bidsheet and send it to Rodeo Drive/ Beverley Hills. Then there was the waiting game. I could tell by the NFA letter if I had won or lost. Today its much easier. I look at thousands of coins on sixbid, in 1990 I only received auction catalogues from NFA/ Stacks/ Paramount....
John

 

I was out of collecting for over 30 years. I have a collection of over 500 pieces and nearly every one was bought before the internet was a gleam in Al Gore's eyes. Most were brought off mail order lists (some had photos). I made the rounds to coin shops in my area. I'd walk in and ask 'got any ancients?'. Most of the time they didn't. Became friends with a couple of the shop owners who would put aside any ancients they picked up until the next I came in.

 

Evan, enjoy being 18. 48 is pretty good. But when you get to be my age (71) you'll wish you had spent more time enjoying life, doing things that you like, and becoming your own person. Take it from an old man, youth is GOOD!

 

It wouldn't be because without the internet, the fake makers wouldn't knoe how to make fakes (they wouldn't have the photo resources for one thing) and you'd likely be buying from actual experts.

Generally far fewer fakes in the coin markets before the year 2000.

 

how true is the expression "youth is wasted on the young" - Oscar Wilde?? I am 63 and I sometimes think if only I knew at 18 what I know now - but it doesn't work that way - I remember in my early 20's praying - "God let me win the lottery now so that I don't have to spend a lifetime wasting my time at work" - but now I think that if I had won the lottery, given what I was doing in 1980 in my early 20's I would not have had a very long lifetime - so I think the Lord above was merciful in ensuring that I DIDN'T win a fortune.

I do wish He had got me started on ancient coins before 1998!

Actually one piece of advice I can give the young is get rid of the television and do not spend so much time in front of a screen - it is addicting and mostly a waste of time. I learned that when the kids were young and we got rid of the television - best decision we ever made.

 

Okay, if I'm being invited to tell old-guy stories, I'm sure not going to refuse.

I started collecting as a small child in the late 1960s or early 70s. My brother was six years older, with enough allowance money to occasionally buy a coin magazine, its back pages filled with classified ads -- that era's eBay. No final value fees, but you paid by the line or the word to run the ad. That made them concise -- "BU 1955-S dimes, 50cSFV + SASE to <postal address>". Send him 50 cents face value of silver coin and a self-addressed stamped envelope, and he'd mail you a BU 1955-S dime. I don't remember what the actual abbreviation was for "silver face value", but I certainly remember SASE.

Other hobbies intervened through the 70s and 80s; I completely missed the 1979-80 silver/gold spike until it was all over.

I got my first email account in fall of 1980 when I went off to college, but it could only send messages to other people on the same system. By 1983 or so, I was able to send and receive over an internet (a collection of networks), but the address I used had to say what route the message should take, and it was... complicated. As I recall, we used UUCP to get through the campus network to a machine that would gateway onto CSNET, which could then convey the message to BITNET. I think the CSNET gateway called up once per day, so there'd be up to a 1-day wait for your message to go out, and then at least another day for any reply to come back -- assuming it was possible to reply along that path, which was by no means guaranteed. Sending photos? That was still science fiction. (I do remember visiting the school's Image Processing Lab a time or two, and watching as it laboriously worked to sharpen a high-resolution 256x256 black-and-white image...)

By the time I got back into the hobby, eBay and PayPal and Google were well-established, so things weren't all that different. We'll see how much things change by the time I finally do succumb to the lure of ancients...

 

OP, I would add to your listing of memorable internet dates for ancient collectors when Moneta-L was founded. I was getting bored with US around that time, and stumbled across Yahoo group. That is where I virtually met such luminaries as @curtislclay, @dougsmit, @Valentinian, @Barry Murphy, and other true "giants" of internet based ancient coin collecting. The modern hobby owes such a massive debt of gratitude to these and other people its not even possible to thank them enough. The entirety of my interest in this great hobby is due to them and their wise words and great advice.

 

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That's my plan as soon as the Pandemic is over and I won't teach on -line. I went back to the arts the last 3 times I retired until needed for medical leave teachers and this will be the 4th. ( they only celebrated the first time )

Why do it some might wonder. I love teaching college science, my reviews by the deans is very good, I can have more money to spend on playthings, etc. I have started ordering some replacement water-soluble oils as they do dry out fast and heavy body acrylics. Jim

 

I started collecting ancients in grad school. I had been a US coin collector (not very serious) in my childhood. In the academic year 1971/2 I was studying abroad and had lots of chances to go to shops with piles of unidentified ancient coins. Because I knew nothing about them I bought the cheap ones that looked relatively good (many of the bigger ones turned out to be common Byzantine folles). Now I'm pretty sure the dealers had better coins they didn't even show me--saving them for collectors who knew more than I did (which would have been everyone except the most ignorant tourists). I got an ancient-coin book or two and learned a bit and showed my coins to a local expert who told me which were fakes. I never got any money back for fakes because I always bought several coins at a time and the dealer would say that was included in the total because the coins were not individually priced (coins would be individually priced now, but those inexpensive ones were not at the time) and we had bargained a price for the whole group.

When I got back to the US I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, and local dealers (coin dealers were much more common in those days) had a few now and then. But, I contacted dealers through their ads in Coin World and got on a few mailing lists. As others have noted, many of the coins would be offered with only a grade to describe them. Only a fraction were photographed. By the 1980s photographs were far more common.

Here is a page from a small-format Empire catalog from Fall, 1982. I bought coin 3201, a Trajan denarius (and a few others). If you look at the prices you will see they would not cost much more in dollars today.



The overhead in putting out lists must have been huge. Like Terence noted, we worried that if we didn't buy, we would be dropped from the mailing list (rightly so). I think the key to higher prices in those days was availability. In the supply and demand balance, the supply was so limited compared to now. Actually, I suppose there were a lot of coins out there, but how could I, in Montana, know about them and how could the seller, somewhere far away, know about me? Well, the internet has solved that, hasn't it?

Speaking of supply, the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s increased the supply dramatically. Tons (literally) of coins formerly in Yugoslavia (which used to be a country), Bulgaria, etc. were released onto the market. Now attractive coins of Gordian III with vis-a-vis busts from Marcianopolis are very common, but before 1990 they were rare and expensive. We in the west had no idea what was behind the Iron Curtain and didn't expect all those formerly rare coins to come to market. I just looked through a few old catalogs and coins from that region are hardly represented, and when they are they are more costly than now.

Here is how it worked for me. A catalog would come in the mail. My wife would call me at work and say such-and-such a catalog came and did I want to see it right away. If it was Berk, the answer was "I can wait" because it was a buy-or-bid sale, but if it was an Empire fixed-price list, I wanted to see it so I could call and order if there was something I wanted. We were living in Montana then and mail got to the coasts a day earlier than it got to me, so many good coins were already gone. I remember calling Dennis Kroh (Empire, in Florida) and trying to order an Odovacer AE4 he had for $100. In irritation he responded that he had already had twenty orders for it! (Pricing coins "right" can be a challenge.) Like Terence noted, now the electrons get to me as soon as they get to the east coast, so that disadvantage has disappeared.

For decades I accumulated paper catalogs and used them as a "price guide." I took many notes on coins I would like and what they cost. Before the internet if you wanted to know what a "good VF" coin of some ruler cost, you had few resources other than your Sear "Coins and their Values" book and notes.

Some dealers sent out paper auction catalogs a month early and you could assemble your bids and mail them back to get there in time. A while after the auction, if you won anything, you would get a letter with an invoice, then mail a check back, then when he got it (plus time for the check to clear if he didn't know you) he'd mail it to you. The turnaround was very long compared to now, but there was no alternative and it seemed natural. Times have changed.

We traveled quite a bit in the summers and every time we visited a city I called all the coin stores and asked if they had any ancient coins. Most didn't, but some did. A store with a few ancient coins was worth a 20- or 30-minute drive, just to look. Sometimes a purchase resulted. My parents had moved to near LA , so I visited dealers like Malter, NFA (mostly over my head) and London Coin Galleries (near Disneyland) and sometimes the Long Beach show (over Spring Break). Usually purchases resulted.

I was on an academic calendar so the summer ANA, at that time usually near the beginning of August, was a show I could attend. If it was in Chicago or Denver I could go and every few years I did. In those days (but rarely anymore) there would be middle-eastern men with small suitcases full of hoard coins, selling wholesale to dealers. Rather than "work them up" many were put out for sale in "pick bins" for $x each depending upon quality. I loved sitting in front of boxes of coins searching for something that was worth more to me than, say, the requested $10 each. I bought a lot of 3rd and 4th century Roman coins at prices far below fixed-price list prices. The dealers at a show did not have to identify them, work them up, photograph them, clip the photographs, compose the layout and type the description, take it to the printer, get copies back and paste the mailing labels on them, mail it, wait, and then deal with the irritation of no orders for some coins and five orders for others. However, I was well aware that the cost of travel and hotel had to be factored in and the coins were not really cheaper when that was taken into account. But it sure was fun to see coins "live." Life-size photographs in 300 dpi are not great. With modern digital images far greater than life-size we are spoiled!

Pre-internet if you lived in a big city you might have belonged to a coin club and had collecting friends. Or, like me, you might have lived in a small city and collected alone. You appreciated your own coins and there was almost no one to show them to. I'm very lucky my wife liked ancient history. There must have been US-coin collectors in my town, but they would not have cared about ancients. I read ancient history for fun (from paper books) and appreciated my meager holdings by myself.

I can probably see more images of coins, and more really good coins, on-line now, for sale fixed-price or at an upcoming auction today, than I saw in all my first twenty-five years of collecting via paper catalogs--not counting coin shows. Now, with CoinTalk, you can learn more about ancient coins on-line than I could after buying many books and looking at articles in academic libraries. (Try joining Academia.edu, it's free, if you want to read academic articles on ancient coins.)

I worked hard and put many years and many hours and lots of travel learning about ancient coins. It is SO much easier now. Be grateful for ancient coins on the internet.