Collection World Coins
Beginning Your World Coin Collection
Collecting world coins is a fun, fascinating and affordable hobby able to suit any budget – and an interest which is often sparked when one runs across coins from previous travels in a dresser drawer.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of world coins is that they are quite different from US coins, coming in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, metals, colors and designs. With so many possible directions to take with your new hobby, your first question may be what focus to take. When I first began collecting with my youngest son (then aged 10), I saw it as a way to “virtually” travel the world and learn advanced geography together – and being a lifelong lover of world maps, I mounted one to a bulletin board, bought a supply of map pins, and we stuck a pin in every country we had a coin for as our collection grew.
Many collectors enjoy such an approach to collecting – having a representative coin from every country in the world (perhaps by birth year) – while others simply collect any attractive coin whose designs catch their eye.
But the question is, where do you find more coins to add to your budding collection?
Buying from coin shops
If you’re lucky to live in a town large enough to have a coin shop or two, you can stop in, tell them you’re a new collector, and ask if they have any foreign coins on hand that you can look through. Even shops that don’t deal in world coins occasionally get them in as part of a larger collection – and to many US dealers, they’re simply unwanted “junk” that they really don’t have a market for. If these coins are loose, circulated, unidentified, and not silver, you can expect to pay as little as 5 or 10 coins for a dollar.
Buying on the Internet
This can be tricky.
If you look on sites like Ebay, you can routinely find “lots” (groups) of world coins by the pound or by the hundreds. Shop carefully, however, since many of these lots may be heavy on dirty Canadian pocket change, modern Mexican, coins that are stained, scratched or otherwise in rough condition, and/or lots that contain up to ten or more or the exact same coin type. Be sure to examine the photos and descriptions carefully, to get a good idea of what you’ll be getting before buying or placing a bid – and check the seller’s ratings to see if other buyers have been happy with their purchases.
As a full-time world dealer, I order world coins from select suppliers 100 pounds at a time, and spend many hours per week sorting the nicer coins into 50 World Coin Bags, that come in a nifty little pouch, with no two coins alike. These bags are an excellent start for brand new collectors, and will contain a wide variety of sizes, metals, designs, and countries from across the world.
Buying at coin shows
Coin shows are like a candy store for any collector! Usually lasting between one and three days – with 50 to 100 or more tables – most large metropolitan areas have at least one coin show per year. Most of the dealers focus on US coins, but occasionally, you will find a world dealer or two with a whole table or more of goodies to go through. And often, a number of US dealers will bring a small bin of their unwanted world coins (just ask!) in hopes to find an eager collector who is willing to buy them!
Caring for and storing your collection
Tip number one is to never, ever, clean a coin: it will remove any remaining mint luster, and give it an unnatural tone, color and shine that will automatically devalue your coin and make it undesirable to other collectors.
The first thing you will want to do is to get your coins into individual protective coverings -the most popular route stapling them into cardboard 2?2′s that you can label with date, country and denomination; each of which should be replaced ever year or two to avoid potential discoloration of your coin.
Once your coins are individually “flipped”, one of the best ways to store them is in clear vinyl “pocket pages”, which are pre-punched to go into three-ring binders, making it easy to pull out and show off to friends and visitors!
Building your collection for the long-term
If you’re having fun and plan to collect on a long-term basis, I highly recommend getting a copy of the Krause Catalog of World Coins for the current year (the catalog actually comes out in June for the following year). At roughly 2-1/2″ thick (quite hefty!) – with hundreds of pages divided by country – this book is “the Bible” of world coin collecting, complete with photographic images, and values for each coin in different grades. It’s somewhat pricy at $50 or so – but for the more serious collector, can save a lot of money both in not getting over-charged for coins they’re buying, as well as allowing one to “cherry pick” coins out of dealer “junk bins” that may be way underpriced. And unless you’re a casual collector, never get an older issue of the catalog – since while most values remain relatively stable from one year to the next, some of the “better” coin values can change considerably: unfortunately, in either direction!
Inge Burbank co-owner and world coin & currency expert at J&J Coins. Visit: http://www.jjcoins.com
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