Great American Coin Show in Chicago (Rosemont)

I really wanted this coin by James 1st but could not justify spending $250 on it. It is in really good condition!

 

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I don't mean to hog the thread, so I will post just once more. I want to give a shout out to four dealers I found extremely friendly and willing to share their knowledge and experience.
- Andy Skrabalak showed me his amazing coins and answered a lot of my questions.
- Coleman Foster was equally amazing.
- Jon Sullivan (the off-struck seated quarters are his) had an absolutely amazing collection of error coins. He was happy to let me photograph his coins and chat for a while.
- My absolute favorite table was Michael Bezayiff's. He had an amazing collection of ancient coins. He pulled trays out for me and let me handle any coin I wanted. His knowledge about history could have kept me there for hours. I spent nearly a third of my entire time at the show sitting and listening to him talk. The James 1 farthing is his coin. I almost bought it purely because he was so great. If I had $10,000 to spend and had to spend it somewhere, He would have gotten most of it!

I realized as I walked around that there were some really big names in which I felt embarrassed not to know. I believe in giving honor to whom honor is due, but that is hard to do if you only find out later that, "Yeah! He wrote a book on that and is an expert in that area."

 

@JoshuaP thank you for the nice report! Congrats on getting a solid price for the 90% and on finding some cool new additions. As far as dealers go, most are perfectly fine but there are always a few bad ones. I also had that experience of some guy calling my coins fake at a show a few years back. They weren’t and another dealer bought them at a fair price. It’s definitely not a fun experience but try to focus on the positives and just ignore dealers like that. Don’t worry about going up to others to sell as most will be better (either they will agree, counter, or pass but they won’t tend to insult).

And feel free to post as much as you like about the show. We like to read reports.

 

Overall I thought it was a great show and I saw and purchased some nice coins. Thursday was much more busy than Friday, which was a good day to purchase after spending Thursday scoping to see what interested me. Many people were selling silver, and dealers had a lot of gold coins on sale - this is not surprising. Many beautiful bust halves were on sale, and many of them way out of price range. Due to its proximity, They were also several dealers at this show that did not attend the ANA show in OKC. They seemed pleased with the sales and transactions with other dealers.