What did they collect way back when?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coin_collecting

"According to Suetonius in his De vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars), written in the first century CE, the emperor Augustus would sometimes present old and exotic coins to friends and courtiers during festivals & other special occasions"

its kinda ironic that coin collectors ended up on coins themselves




edited - moved to other thread

 

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Buy the book before you buy the coin.

There are many. Very many. People will recommend the one they happen to have, not having seen many more, but many more exist.

There are many ways to do this. One is to just goto your local book retailer and see what they have. Note the authors of the books you like. Look them up in the ANA Library Catalog and/or the ANS Library Catalog and see which ones are really numismatists. You can judge a book by its bibliography, also. Alot of so-called "coffee table" books have pretty pictures, but facts are lacking or statements are inaccurate.

If you goto a state, regional or national show, you might meet JOHN BURNS or another of the numismatic booksellers. There are others who sell new books -- and that's fine -- but Burns and few others specialize in classic books of lasting value.

As for the new books, Whitman Publishing has been aggressive over the last five or so years in creating a line of astounding and affordable books about coins, their history and collecting. Among them are the "100 Greatest" for Ancients, US Tokens, US Banknotes and US Coins. (The books in the 100 Greatest series are $29.95 each.)


Join the email list of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society. Click here for the E-Sylum. (You can read the archives without joining.) No one knows books like the NBS.

 

Thanks for the info.

 

Lots of books on coins out there. At one coin show a dealer has a table completely full of coin books, some on new ones, old ones, foreign and on and on and on. See if there are any coin stores or coin shows in your area and try them. I've had a difficult time finding to many books on coins at regular book stores though.
If you do find a book on USA coins before 1492, it may well be a fake though.

 

When I go to the FUN show in Orlando in January I'll check it out. I also want to get my son a good book on coin grading. I also wonder if there is a book or publication just on BF Half Dollars.

 

Search the Library before you buy the book before you buy the coin ...

I went to the ANS Library online catalog and entered "Franklin Half Dollar" anf found this
Tomaska, Rick. The complete guide to Franlin half dollars / by Rick Tomaska. (2002)

Rick Tomaska is a well-known numismatist. Click on the Full Title link and you will see that this is a DLRC Virginian Beach book. DLRC (David Lawrence Rare Coins) has been a publisher of collector catalogues of US Type for about 20 years, maybe more. Among the DLRC authors are Kevin Flynn and David Lange as well as Rick Tomaska and others.

Books drive the coin market. Books rest on articles. If you use the same library catalog, you will find citations to articles in The Numismatist and FUN Notes, speaking of FUN.

If you are an ANA member, you can borrow any book in their Library for the cost of shipping and insurance both ways.

If you are an ANA member, the ANA library will photocopy articles for a modest fee. The price is worth the investment, if you have an interest in numismatics.

 

Coin cleaning was considered acceptable way back when too...

In the early 1900's, a $5 gold piece were often given to relatives/kids as birthday presents, etc. This was a days work at ford in 1908 or about a weeks worth in other jobs.

 

Again thanks for all the great info. So much help and knowledge here.

 

Bah, you beat me to this one. However, I do have another ancient reference to coin collecting. This is from Pliny the Elder's Natural History XXXIII, XLVI, 132, from a section on counterfeit coins: "spurious methods are objects of study, and a sample of a forged denarius is carefully examined and the aldulterated coin is bought for more than genuine ones." Such ancient forgeries are actually still commonly available, though now they generally go for much less than genuine issues.

 

GD and Gao - can either of you show me conclusive proof of ancient coin collections? I don't doubt that it existed in some form, but to say that this has been a hobby for two thousand years is a bit of an exaggeration, I feel. Now, if there were a Roman text on coins of Alexander the Great or such, then I would believe it.

Before you repeat yourselves, the fact that Augustus gave out curios to his courtiers does not make him a numismatist. Neither does the quote from Pliny prove much! However, there was found a hoard of Roman gold coins, each from different emperors, consisting of about a dozen coins. But this is as close as I've come to finding anything like a proof of an ancient coin collection.

 

When you think about it almost all humans and many animals are rather on the pack rat mode most of the time. People everywhere collect STUFF. Look in almost anyone's garage, basement, attic, etc. Just STUFF all over the place. People just have to collect anything and everything. When you see the look on any kids face when you hand them a shinny coin, you would know that as long as there have been kids and as long as the coins were shinny, there was a coin collector.
People collect knives, swords, guns, cars, Beanie Babies, Baseball/Football cards, world war 2 stuff and anything else that is solid. So why not coins way, way, way back.

 

Culturally, it doesn't make much sense for the Romans to collect counterfeits. More likely, the moneychangers were purchasing the coins to examine the methods used to fake them in the same way a modern corporation would seek out the methods used to reproduce their own products.

 

First, let me say that I agree that the passage is vague enough where we can't tell with 100% certainty. I have no problem with you disagreeing with this passage or pointing out how uncertain it is.

However, I'm not sure if that would work out too well. After all, if people were paying even more than the face value for counterfeits, wouldn't that just encourage people to counterfeit more? You wouldn't even need to try to make something good enough to pass in common circulation. You could just make it, rub it against something to cause wear, and sell it to whoever was investigating for a high profit. This same thing may have happened if these people were collectors, but in their case, they would probably be disinterested in stopping counterfeits, so it wouldn't matter to them.

That said, if it was some form of authority that was purchasing them, I would assume that the purpose would be to investigate whether mintworkers were moonlighting or stealing silver. After all, there are plenty of forees that seem to be made with official dies. That makes more sense to me than trying to examine methods, since it would allow them to track the counterfeiting to the source and prevent it from happening again.

 

Collecting in the united States was quite different in the 19th century. Although there were a few collectors around for the most part collecting did not take off in this country until 1857 with the retiremnet of the large cents. This started a lot of people off with the idea of putting a set together before they all disappeared from circulation.

The American Numismatic Society was founded in 1858 and was almost totally devoted to te study and collecting of ancient coins and to a lesser extent colonial coins. It was commonly "understood that those people who spent their time on the modern pieces for the 1850's,60's etc were basically wasting their time. (Although the ANS has one of th finest collections of U coins today, they still have a bias towards the ancient coins.)

As mentioned earlier what collecting of US coin that was done was mainly just date sets. No attention was paid to mintmarks and most collectors simply kept their sets up to date by ordering a proof coin from the mint each year. Typically the collector would just send in the face value for a business strike or a few cents extra for a proof and the mint would send one by return mail.

Staring in the 1860's the collecting of early large cents by die variety was becoming popular, and the collecting of tokens and medals depicting George washington was also very popular. By the end of the century they would be bringing prices that for many of them still have not been equaled. Mint Director Snowden of the Philadelphia mint was an avid collector of Washingtonia and one of the reason for the restriking of rarities, patterns and other items at the mint was to provide him with trading material that he could use to expand and improve the Mints collection of Washington pieces.

The 1804 dollar was introduced to collectors for the first time when an engraving of this previously unknown coin was used as the cover illustration on the 1842 catalog of the Mint's collection holdings.

The idea of collecting by mintmark was introduces by Augustus Heaton (I may have the first name wrong) in a booklet on mintmarks published in 1893. It had little effect and the collecting of US coins by date and mintmark did not become widespread until the 1920's and 30's with the introduction of the coin board.