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Message:: [QUOTE="Carausius, post: 2545868, member: 76440"]I am in my early-50s, but I began collecting ancient coins in the late 1970s, around age 14. I collected through high school and then took time off to go to college, grad school, start a carreer and date, before starting to collect ancients again in the mid-1990s. In the 1970's, I remember rummaging through the classified ads of the Coin World weekly newspaper (that's right, I said "newspaper") each week, looking for new dealers of ancients to whom I could write for a free list.  Many of those lists had no photos at all. I remember snail mailing bid lists to auction houses, and waiting weeks for snail mail notification if I'd won a coin. I remember the market bubble forming as the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. I also remember the bubble bursting and the rare coin market collapsing as the Hunt's shennanigans ended in disaster. I remember my dad giving me an article to read about NFA, in which Bruce McNall bragged about making deals in source countries for "fresh" coins to import into the U.S. When I got back into ancient coins circa 1996, nearly 15 years after my first forray in the hobby, I remember being surprised that prices were about the same as they'd been in 1981!  This the result of the burst market bubble and the fallen iron curtain.[/QUOTE]