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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Yahya, post: 558300, member: 15639&quot;]Ardatirion makes some <i>excellent</i> points!</p><p><br /></p><p>But consider, for a moment, this thread from my point of view; viz. a non-American&#039;s.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>First of all, I haven&#039;t a clue sometimes what you are all talking about: - what&#039;s an ASE? a vdbc (or whatever it was)?&nbsp; They&#039;re just&nbsp; alphabet soup to me.&nbsp; No, I&#039;m not looking for an education right now!&nbsp; Just giving another perspective.&nbsp; So while you guys might be sick of the sight of them, or hearing people talk about them, they&#039;d probably attract quite a bit of interest anywhere else - simply as representatives of some other part of the world.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Secondly, as an Aussie, I reckon all those large pennies&nbsp; and ha&#039;pennies I grew up with are fairly boring - except for a couple that are hard to find - but I&#039;d still have the very first US quarter I ever picked up in change at the milk bar as a kid, if it weren&#039;t for a very involved series of circumstances that are irrelevant right now.&nbsp; It was such an interesting and, yes, a <i>different</i> kind of coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>After all that, I&#039;d like to paraphrase Ardatirion&#039;s sentence: &quot;Personally, I think all US coins are over collected&quot; thus: &quot;Personally, I think all coins<i> of just about any country </i>are over collected <i>by the citizens of that country</i>.&quot;&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Or more precisely, perhaps:&nbsp; Any coin collected more by the citizens of the issuing nation than by those of all other nations is probably not quite as noteworthy as the first group of citizens think it is.</p><p><br /></p><p>Of course, we have to allow for pride in one&#039;s country and community; in a very real sense, coins, stamps, medals and banknotes represent a significant part of the shared <i>cultural</i> capital of a nation or community.&nbsp; And so that &quot;everyone ... [should] have an opportunity to collect&quot;, it makes sense that many of us begin by collecting the most interesting coins we find in pocket change (or stamps on the envelopes we get in the mail).&nbsp;&nbsp; In some countries where poverty is endemic, even that form of collecting is simply impractical.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>And I, too, would &quot;take a unique coin over a coin in a unique grade any day&quot;.&nbsp; I&#039;&#039;m not a condition collector; all I ask is that the major design features of the coin are reasonably easy to discern, because my interests centre more on design and history than on monetary value.&nbsp;&nbsp; (Of course, if I do get a coin in excellent condition, I try to keep it looking good.)&nbsp; But rarity, by itself, doesn&#039;t much interest me, except in so far as it hinders my completing a series or set, or (sometimes) even seeing a good likeness of an object.</p><p><br /></p><p>So although I do have a moderately complete collection of commoner Australian types, I&#039;m actually much more excited by my Chinese collections, both the cast &quot;cash&quot; coins (mostly bronze) and the machine-struck silver dollars.&nbsp; I also have the nucleus of a collection of many different kinds of token, which I aim to grow gradually as circumstances permit.&nbsp; And I&#039;m now reading up on East Asian charms (China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam), and looking forward to beginning a representative collection of some of the better designs - considered as miniature artworks.</p><p><br /></p><p>In the sense that these collections are personal and idiosyncratic, are not driven by monetary value, and (to some extent) are not chosen because they are fairly accessible, I don&#039;t expect to contribute greatly to the kind of &quot;over-collecting&quot; that will make it harder for other collectors to find what they like.&nbsp; But anyone who aims first and foremost at acquiring the rarest specimens certainly does contribute to such over-collecting.&nbsp; I suspect that if we all collected just what we actually liked and enjoyed, <i>in itself</i>, the competition between us&#039;d be a little less severe ...[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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