How do you organize your trays?

Those are some really nice coins! Thanks for sharing your system.

Beautiful group of tetradrachms. With such a focus to your collection it makes sense to organize by primary reference. Thanks for sharing!

That is an interesting organizational strategy to group geographical like that. You’re trays look wonderful layer out on the table like that! In fact that looks like a very peaceful office / coin space for admiring your nice collection. I too enjoy a nice French press cup of coffee

Those are wonderful coins Q! That Hadrian drachm in the center is especially nice.

I can see how you would want to have separate trays for sub-collections like your fantastic divi series. I’m considering having a separate tray for my Nerva Antonines.

Thanks for sharing your system!

That is really cool! Very colorful and creative. There is something to be said for building things yourself. Thank you for sharing.

Nice coins and trays! I agree that coins if similar size and type look nice together. That is a great tray of dirhams.

Yes that does sound like a lot of administrative work. I used to keep a detailed database of my collection but I found I’ve not been very good about updating it.

Your system sounds very organized and the photo of your trays and tags is very nice. Thank you for sharing.

 

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I separate the coins by category and organise the coins by reference number - RR coins by Crawford, Imperial by RIC, Greek by, well nothing much yet, but maybe HGC eventually.

I also usually separate the metals - just because the bronzes can be much larger than the precious metal coins. While it would be nice to keep them together, it would mean putting everything into trays with larger holes, thus requiring more trays.

I posted this picture recently - it's one of a small 3-tray, 216-coin cabinet by Swann that I got secondhand a few years ago. It was sold as part of the sale of the collection of a token collector and described as "ideal for a small 17th century county collection". In fact, it's just right for denarius-sized coins and after some organisation last year, it houses denarii from the Flavians to the Severans - this is the middle tray, the Antonines.

I actually think I should put the paper labels below the felts - these trays are double-pierced, so it's easy to get the labels (& coins) out. I include the RIC number on one side and the Tantalus reference on the other. I resolved once to printing out QR codes with the web address of the Tantalus entry on the cards, but haven't done that yet. Maybe during the next reorg.


I've got a larger Nichols cabinet - the Crozier model, with 28 trays. I ordered this with a silly mixture of tray sizes, so I'm left with something that's currently housing the sorrier part of my Greek silver and bronze coins and a few other bits and pieces (a range of asses & dupondii). It doesn't have enough trays of any particular size to store any other full part of the collection.

I need to pull off the labels on the trays - in most cases, they no longer correspond to the contents.



I am a big fan of Abafil trays and now have 30, though it looks like 3 of these are still in plastic wrapping and a couple more house almost no coins. Here are most of them.


The stack on the right has Roman Republican silver coins, plus a tray of Augustus; on the left, there are Roman Republican bronzes, plus a try of imitative denarii (OK, I have about 10, so there's plenty of room there!), plus a few medals. There are two trays of Imperial sestertii in the middle. Sestertii and other thick coins don't fit well in the Nichols cabinet - the trays can be too thin to accommodate them and I had to remove some trays to avoid rubbing away the coins. One of the Abafil trays is of their deep type, for a few Aes Grave (I have very few).

Within the trays, the coins are arranged by Crawford number and the higher numbers are in the higher trays in the stack.

These are near the top and there are quite a few spaces - other trays filled up further down in the stack and the solution was to insert an empty tray and move a lot of coins, to leave a minimum of 7-8 spaces per tray.



Some of these coins are actually quite nice, though they don't look it in these 'phone pictures in bad light!



As I said, my Greek coins aren't in any reasonable organisation. Some are in Abafil trays, but not organised in any pattern. The same goes for Byzntines - a few are actually beside the Nichols cabinet sitting on labels, awaiting the next great reorg when they will take their rightful, still to be determined, place within.

ATB,
Aidan.