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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kaparthy, post: 709352, member: 57463&quot;]<b>The Zen of Collecting</b></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Supply and demand, of course, determine price.&nbsp; With &quot;world&quot; all coins compete against all others, Tibetan against Italian States and so on.&nbsp; Moreover, with world, themes are a possibility: turtles, ships, flora...&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Often, you will find that world collectors know more and are motivated more by pure history, whereas with US, the focus is almost exclusively on the coin itself: grade, strike, luster.&nbsp; Few US collectors care who was Secretary of the Treasury when a coin was struck, whereas with world, often, the Mint or Mint Master, is as important to the attribution as the king in whose name it was struck.&nbsp; British coinage of the Middle Ages is a perfect example of that.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>Another example are the Bank of Upper Canada pennies and halfs struck at the same time as US Large Cents.&nbsp; Though of much smaller populations, the beautiful, medallic pennies of BUC sell for much less than the US of the time.&nbsp; Demand trumps supply when determining price.&nbsp; So, world coins tend to be more affordable for the history that defines them.</p><p><br /></p><p>Also, with world, the longer timeline opens more doors.&nbsp; World includes ancients and within Greek and Roman are broad contexts into which all of &quot;America&quot; would fit, hundreds of years of changes, empires, people and places.&nbsp; A large silver coin of Alexandria, Egypt, might be pursued because this coin represents the Library.&nbsp; On the other hand, no one pursues a US coin because the issue paid for The Library of Congress.&nbsp; The two are not commensurate.&nbsp; It is a different way to think about collecting.</p><p><br /></p><p>One of the reasons that drew me to ancients was that these are the models for the US coins we accept almost uncritically.&nbsp; The Seated Liberties, Walking Liberties, all the eagles and wreaths, they have antecedents in the ancient world that were known to the designers and artists for the US Mint.&nbsp; The Mint Cabinet always held ancients.&nbsp; Perhaps one of the iconic collections (now long dispersed) was that of John Quincy Adams.&nbsp; The Founders of our Republic knew their ancient history from Greek and Latin texts they read.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>I recently got interested in the Middle Ages specifically because the economic and financial histories foreshadowed our own globalist society: a plethora of coinages at a time of increased trade.&nbsp; In response, the bankers of the Middle Ages invented &quot;pounds shillings pence&quot; as an abstract money-of-account, much like &quot;Eurodollars&quot; and &quot;Euroyen&quot; today, money from one place used as money of account in a different place.</p><p><br /></p><p>You see, that paragraph above has nothing to do with resubmitting a coin to get a higher grade.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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