Insider's Guide to U. S. Coin Values - Scott A. Travers - Mass Market Paperback

Chapter One THE LURE OF COINS Coins have kindled people's imagination and aroused their collecting instincts ever since the first crude examples were struck in Asia Minor more than five hundred years before the birth of Christ. Coins are handheld works of art, miniature milestones along the march of time. Many times, they're stores of precious metal. Rare coins are worth far more than face value (the value stamped on their surface)--and far more than just their metal content--as collectibles. They can even be an exceptional investment. And, best of all, collecting them can be tremendous fun. In a sense, collecting coins is like digging up buried treasure. The treasure isn't hidden underground, and finding it doesn't require a secret map, but still there's a sense of adventure, an air of excitement--and ultimately a thrill of discovery--in locating needed coins to complete a set (a group of similar coins containing one example from every different date and every different mint that struck the coins). For those who buy wisely and well, there's also an ultimate payoff, for collecting rare coins, like tracking buried treasure, has the potential to be a richly rewarding pursuit. No longer the private preserve of wealthy princes, coin collecting today is among the most popular spare-time diversions in the world. Millions of Americans collect coins on a regular basis, and many others dabble in the field. Most confine their collecting to U.S. coinage, but many use a broader frame of reference in terms of both history and geography, collecting coins from earlier ages--all the way back to ancient times--and from hundreds of other countries around the globe. In recent years, the far-flung base of traditional collectors has been broadened substantially by newcomers who think of themselves not as pure hobbyists but rather as collector/investors. For them, the profit motive is important--and rare coins' profit performance has been excellent when they are held over time. Frequently, people who enter the rare coin market as investors find the field's lure irresistible and cross over the line to become pure collectors. This gives them an opportunity to enjoy the best of both worlds--the fun of a fascinating hobby and the profit of a fine investment, too. Although the instinct to save and savor coins is as old as coinage itself, coin collecting didn't reach the masses until the twentieth century. Prior to that, it was largely an indulgence of the nobility and scholars--people with time and money to devote to such a pursuit. As recently as the early 1900s, major U.S. coin shows seldom attracted more than a few hundred participants, and the major activity wasn't the buying and selling of coins, but rather the exhibiting of collections. The democratization of coin collecting got under way in earnest in the 1920s and '30s. During that period, Americans were starting to find themselves with more leisure time (some of it enforced, during the 1930s, by the Great Depression). What's more, the United States Mint was turning out dozens of commemorative coins, which piqued people's interest and drew many thousands into the hobby. Special holders for storing and displaying coins started to appear around that time, along with guidebooks listing the coins' value--and those set up a framework that made collecting easier for the many new devotees. During the next few decades, rare coins evolved from a drawing-room diversion into a field with true mass appeal and a massive collector base. The coin market's growth was hastened by developments at the Mint. In the 1950s, for instance, many new collectors became involved with coins by buying annual proof sets--sets of specimen coins--from Uncle Sam. The Mint resumed production of these in 1950, following an eight-year lapse, and by the end of the decade, sales had mushroomed from fewer than 52,000 sets in 1950 to more than 1.1 miTravers, Scott A. is the author of 'Insider's Guide to U. S. Coin Values - Scott A. Travers - Mass Market Paperback' with ISBN 9780440241652 and ISBN 0440241650.