Recently back in the coin game, I unearthed my hoard of world coins and added some recent acquisitions to it from my travels. Now, I need a good album for a variety of shapes and sizes from around the globe and time. I am thinking about a Dansco album and filling it with various generic pages they have for different sized coins. The coins wouldn't fit perfectly, but I like the album format. I'm not a big fan of the cardboard flaps in plastic page albums. Is this a good idea? Any other suggestions? How do you all store/display your world coins?
For my world accumulation I like to arrange mine by country which means sizes all over the place and in no particular order, so the nice album with pages idea doesn't work well. I've got the 2x2s in the pages and stuck in binders. But, these are not valuable coins by any stretch, so a super nice presentation is not something I'm looking to drop money on. Looking over the Lighthouse site and I see something that is a bit of a combination, and looks to be flexible. https://www.lighthouse.us/collect-coins/coin-holders-2x2-accessories/ I'm interested in confirming the self adhesive coin holders are 'safe'. If so, they slip into the 'matrix' pages and look a bit nicer than the plain vinyl/plastic pages. If I had nicer raw coins this might be something I'd do...though I'm a bit leery of the 'self adhesive'.
When I first started collecting I wanted to be able to see all the coins as you do. I put them in a 2x2s, in 20-coin plastic sheets, and then in a binder. And guess what, very soon I had more binders than I had room to store. If you are serious in your collecting a variety of world coins you will be in the same situation sooner rather than later. Now what I do it get the boxes which hold 75-100 2x2s and store them in there. Much more economical on space. I wish I had taken pictures of them all before putting them in there, but I didn't. So now I have a project which will last me well into retirement.
For several of my sub collections I took a wide dansco binder and put in loose dansco pages. A purist would use the blank pages. A serious thrifter would merely turn over printed pages. For my counterstamped coins I've done both. Now I have an entire album for each size and one franken-album with assorted sizes for my favorites. Other sub-categories use regular dansco type albums. The only person that you can please is yourself. My choice is do I want to do things as cheaply as possible to leave more money for coin purchases or do I want to go top of the line and nobody but me usually sees it? Whoever buys it in my estate sale won't give a flip anyway.
Dansco Albums are great IF the diameter of the ports match the diameter of the coins. I put together a series of Italy 100 Lire coins using a Dansco Binder with millimeter pages. The diameter of the 100 Lire coin is 27.8 mm so I had to use Dansco pages with 28 mm ports. I thought 0.2 mm difference in size to be inconsequential. I was wrong. The coins do not stay in place. I had to tediously cut very thin strips of cardboard and line the inside of each port in order for the coins to fit snugly. Fortunately, these coins are made of stainless steel so I did not worry too much about possible toning from the cardboard strips. In the end, the set looks beautiful and was worth the extra effort to make the coins fit snugly. However, I think it wouldn't be practical for world coins of varying diameter. You would have to buy a page for each millimeter diameter (starting at 16 mm, 17 mm, 18, mm, etc.). I agree with sakata and Stork in using 2x2s in binders with 20-coin plastic sheets. This way you can organize your coins alphabetically by country. I use Lighthouse albums only for the more valuable or the more appealing world coins in my collection. Additionally, slabbed coins can go into the Lighthouse albumss as well. Ultimately, Lighthouse albums are a beautiful way to display your coins. I believe each binder can hold 36 slabbed coins or 120 coins in 2x2 Quadrum holders. I prefer the Lighthouse albums and maybe someday I will transfer my world coin collection to the Lighthouse albums. The only thing is that these albums are rather expensive. So, the 2x2s in 20-coin plastic sheets is more for organizing coins than displaying them. But they still look good this way.
