The June 4-6, 2021, Texas Numismatic Association annual show and convention was a success for all. Every dealer I talked felt that the market broke out of the doldrums. At the awards ceremony, the Best of Show exhibit went to a First Time Exhibitor -- unprecedented in anyone's recollection at the moment -- and, interesting from my point of view, the topic was medieval France. I attended the show on a last minute invitation from TNA News editor, Ann Marie Avants, to accept an award. It was for "Taking a Different View: Do Ancient Coins Hide 3-D Images?" (See an earlier version here on CoinTalk: https://www.cointalk.com/threads/vi...-images-on-ancient-coins.349565/#post-3832595 Also, for the TNA article, I used the image provided in the discussion by @Roman Collector.) As for the bourse, I drove up from Austin to Arlington without anything much in mind, and I spent the afternoon walking the floor. I finally saw a couple of items that caught my eye. The other was a 1958 Mickey Mantle All Star Card which I bought for my daughter. (She now manages a sports bar. Years ago, she worked several MSNS conventions as a page. It was a good education.) I got it from a Texan name of David Baker who is known in these parts. For myself I found this from Rick Lacina ("Cornboy Coins" of Bondurant, Wyoming). He had a very nice inventory of fossils, gems, and minerals, and the prices were easy to accept. I just could not buy everything. It was a toss-up between this and a Campo del Cielo Meteorite. I also stopped by the Coin World table to say Hi and pass along my business card for them to take back. They have a new app and Rick Amos was pretty happy about it. He told me more than I could manage and I asked him to send me a press release. Basically, you buy Amos stickers to put on your slabs, scan them in, and the app manages your inventory. You can have a want-list. The app tracks your buys and sells. It estimates current prices for you from their information. And the app also attaches their archive of news magazine content about that coin as well as any new content that they publish about that coin. I will have more on this later. We agreed that old guys like me will say they don't need it, but pointing to a table of millennial dealers, it was clearly already a hot item on the floor with those who are comfortable with phones. I saw Clifford Mishler and another ANA governor, but I did not know him and did not catch his name as he drifted past. Also, oddly and somewhat disappointedly, I happened on a current issue of The MichMatist at the free literature table. (Ann Marie had nice things to say about Michael Stubb, mostly because he finally bested her for First Place with the ANA for club newsletters.) I folded it open to my review of the new edition of Beth Deisher's Cash In Your Coins and showed it to a long-suffering wife attending the show with her husband. "Does he keep an inventory?" I asked. "Oh, he probably does," she said as if I'd asked her if Vladimir Putin likes sour cream in his borsht: like, why bother me with that? OK...) I was also disappointed at all the dealers who packed up and left early on Saturday. The show ran through Sunday. I confess that I was there for one day, only. But when we left the awards ceremony, and went back to the bourse, only about a dozen dealers were still selling. My advice for future TNA shows is for you to go early because there is no late.
I got a nice email from a TNA life member who said that was a People's Choice Award. He said that he voted for it and agreed that it was well-deserved.
