(stands up at podium)

Hello. My name is Richard and I am a coin collector. It’s been 37 minutes since I last checked the change in my pocket.

When I was in the second grade an Uncle came to visit and presented me with two blue folders, a red book, and some heavy rolls. The blue folders were Whitman Coin Folders for Lincoln cents 1909-1940 and 1941-1975:

https://whitman.com/coin-folders/whitman-folders/

The red book was The Official Red Book: A Guide Book of United States Coins:

https://whitman.com/books/current-red-books-and-blue-books/

And the rolls were a beginner’s set of Lincoln cents.

It’s like God had decreed that I be born with my neural anatomy optimized for this. One taste and I was hooked.

My collection never amounted to much. I have a few valuable coins but I discovered that worrying about coin value was like worrying about audio fidelity. The latter was wrecking my love of music and the former was wrecking my appreciation of art and history.

Most of my valuable coins I inherited from my Grandfather who decided in late 1929 that the stock market was unsustainable and sold short. The family legend is that one day in 1933 he got a call from his bank saying that some U.S. Treasury agents were there demanding he open his deposit box. He did and they “purchased” nearly all the contents. He was able to keep some finer gold coins under the coin collector’s exemption and some of those I now have.

More fun in my opinion is the few pounds of circulated silver I bought from a dear friend. They were her Aunt’s poker money, mostly Walking Liberty half dollars.

My coin-pusher Uncle eventually sold his valuable coins to finance his model train hobby but gave me the rest of his blue folder collection. It’s quite a lot more extensive than mine because he was able to collect silver coins from change. It’s in a couple of boxes that I haven’t looked at in years. I haven’t even looked at my main collection in years.

But I’m still an enthusiast. Here in north-nowhere Vermont I still find a wild Wheat cent in change a few times a year. I keep the following change jars just for cents:

  • Wheat cents (1909-1958)
  • copper Memorial cents (1959-1981)
  • mixed copper/zinc 1982 Memorial cents
  • zinc Memorial cents (1983-2008)
  • Lincoln Commemorative cents (2009)
  • Shield cents (2010-date)

1982 cents are fun. There are eight different varieties, combinations of:

  • copper/zinc
  • Philadelphia/Denver mints
  • large/small dates

I also have a jar for Canadian coins which were more common in change when the two dollars were closer to parity. Canada stopped making cents in 2012 and they’ve completely disappeared in Canada but are still found here. A surprising number of the “Canadian” quarters I’ve gotten in change were actually from Bermuda.

Except for saving Vermont and New Hampshire quarters I never got into the “reverse of the month” quarter shtick. I really like the new 2022 quarter obverse which was designed in 1931. I think it would be a fantastically good-looking coin struck in silver and with higher relief as originally intended.

A year ago I decided to broaden my horizons and bought a book about pre-decimal British coins. I was partially motivated by the descriptions of coins in Neal Stephenson’s “The Baroque Cycle” trilogy and partially motivated by the history of genuine and counterfeit British coins in colonial America:

https://spinkbooks.com/products/coins-of-england-the-united-kingdom-2023-pre-decimal-issues

It’s my standard sitting-on-the-pot read. Now just seeing the cover is enough to loosen my bowels which can be handy at certain times.