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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;red_spork, post: 3324703, member: 74282&quot;]For me, my top goal is to collect the Roman Republic and build a collection that is as comprehensive as possible in bronze and silver, including new varieties as I find them. At some point I&#039;d like to add gold but it is currently out of reach. A second goal is to collect a representative set of colonial, provincial, imitative and other related types. My biggest driving force is basically &quot;do I have the type or variety or not&quot; but I am also trying to buy attractive coins when I can be picky. I don&#039;t aim to have the finest known examples by any means, just coins that I find attractive.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Roughly 2,000 or so for the main collection as described above, perhaps another 300-500 for the &quot;related&quot; stuff.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>My wantlist is essentially a list of all known types and varieties in my area. It&#039;s relatively easy for me to stay on for now because there&#039;s always something I like that I still need for sale but that probably won&#039;t be the case in another decade or two.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>The longest I&#039;ve ever waited for a specific coin was about two years, a coin I really liked but which exceeded my budget before lots even started closing and forced me to focus on other targets. I later had a chance to purchase it direct from the collector who won it in that first auction.</p><p><br /></p><p>As far as my current target, my most recent purchase was in the recent CNG e-auction and wasn&#039;t even on my list of primary targets, but I&#039;d been outbid on those and I felt this coin, while not rare, was attractive and hammering too low so I threw in a bid on it and won. That&#039;s not entirely uncommon for me when these sales with several attractive offerings are ending.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>At least once a day. Most of the time I have my phone background setup to randomly rotate through my coin pictures. It&#039;s a nice way to help me learn to spot them when looking for provenances and it gives me a nice passive way to look at my collection even on busier days.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>About the same amount of time I spend looking for the next target. I don&#039;t have a huge library of old auction catalogs yet but I&#039;ve got several of the major catalogs in my area of collecting. I don&#039;t have too many pre-1970 provenances but I&#039;d say that a quarter or maybe more of my collection has pre-2000 provenance and almost all of it has pre-Italian MOU provenance, not that much of it actually legally requires it yet.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>I have around 10 or so references that I commonly use, including things like Crawford, Sydenham, Essays Russo, Essays Hersh along with some less commonly used ones such as Babelon, Bahrfeldt&#039;s Nachtrage and BMC RR. This is supplemented by a large digital collection of papers from Jstor, Academia.edu, etc. Finally I&#039;ve got around 30 or so printed catalogs and maybe 150 digital catalogs that are used both for reference(RBW, Goodman, etc) and provenance searching.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve also got the usual history texts like Livy but I&#039;ve found myself using the online sources far more than the printed books for these histories due to ease of searching.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Probably 70/30 in favor of auctions[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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