When I was young, I went with my parents shopping in nearby towns. It seems that everywhere we went there was a coin shop, either in the mall, or nearby. While they shopped, I did too. Every shop that I went in had a junk box that I dug through for hours. I don't remember ever leaving any shop without buying at least one coin out of that box. Now days, very few shops have those boxes. It seems the attention has focused on making the high dollar sale for a lot of dealers. I think the junk box was one of the things that really propelled my interest in coin collecting as a small-time collector. I wish those boxes would make a come-back.
I miss the junk box too. I always enjoyed going to a coin show and digging through the box. Because most of the stuff wasn't real high grade/high priced the dealer didn't spend alot of time looking through the stuff in it. I will always remember the 1909 Indian head cent i bought for .85. It was graded AG but the cool thing about it is the little faded S on the rev. of the coin. I miss the Junk Box days , please make them come back.
Obviously at coin shows I am visiting each dealer has a junk box. I have cherry picked more than one.. didn't find anything in the junk boxes at the lakeland show, however, found a nice 1934 1 Balboa silver coin at the antique mall from a dealers junk box for a quarter 8)
Whoa! Look at that! I was at an ANA Convention -- Ft. Lauderdale, I think -- and I looked in the junk box and there was a Mexican 8 Reales. It was worn, of course, but not damaged; a seven dollar coin, easily. "Do you mind?" I asked the dealer. He laughed. "I do it just to see how many people will miss it. You were not the first people this morning to go through the box. It's yours." I have a couple of shops in my area. One has the "Junk Boxes" broken down by value: 5 for a Dollar; 50 cents each. But people throw coins in the wrong boxes, and the owner gets tired of re-sorting them. It is pretty easy to help him out while I look for things to take to school. One of the shops will sell them by the pound, but the price is steep: Nine Dollars per Pound. But you get to pick and choose, so it comes out OK for me. At most coin shows, there is always someone at every junk box. I cannot say that I objectively "cherry picked" a junk box, in the sense that the dealer had no idea what was in there or what it was "really" worth. but like all collectors, the junk box is the magnet that draws me to the hobby. My most recent take was a couple "Democritus/Atom" coins and a few Elizabeth II Two Shillings. Again, these go to school with me as sops to my eighth graders. For instance, when studying ancient Egypt, everyone got one with an assignment to write out everything you can figure out about the culture from this artifact. We tabulated some of the results.
