A Musing On " Rare Coins"

Any collector of romans can tell you that a rare roman coin is incredibly common...

"Scarce" is a under used term when it comes to sellimg.

I agree don't use the word rare unless the coin is an R5. If you see a couple of them for sale on ebay at the same time, then don't use the word. In my eyes rare means you come across one for sale every few years, or longer.

It would be possible for a rare item to be easily and frequently available if the duration of possession was very brief. A "hot-potato" scenario where no one held onto the piece for long before relisting it for sale.

Okay then, how about this analogy? Anything advertised on Coin Shopping Network is NOT rare. Nor any coin or series sold by a multi-level marketing company.

Don't believe the hype! I 'm confident most CCF members know better, but how many potential new collectors do we loose because they sink their kids college money into TPG MS70 ASE's and such, with the hopes of making off with huge profits in a few years. Most of that stuff will never recover the mark-up unless metals really take off (possible).

My grandmother had amazing coins from her time at Sears Roebuck Manager of a large stores cashiers. She kept buckets of Indian cents, Liberty nickels, some gold coins, seated stuff, etc. basically anything old and different, this was in the late 1940's she exchanged for current money.

She got into buying TV show coins before I started collecting. When I did start collecting seriously, my Mom told me all about her Mom's collection. She apparently had a lot of old coins and said I could probably look through them next time we went to see Grandmother. I was excited for a whole year, and often wondered what I see. When we finally visited her, around Christmas, she told me she had given almost all her old worn coins away to another kid so my cousins near by could trade him for baseball cards (grrrr), but she told me she had started a new collection of Kennedy halves, and other stuff with the guys on TV. She was convinced that was the next big thing because of these idiots on TV coin shows, she once had old coins and gold, now she had colored quarters, modern junk over all over graded and modern, common, foreign proof and specimen sets.

My mom told me she remembered at least 4 or 5 full complete sets of Whitman blue folders of Indians and Buffalos and several large paint buckets full of Indians, Buffalo and Liberty nickels, several small (probably 25-50 coin) bags of Morgan and Seated dollars, quite a few gold coins and other odd looking stuff (probably commemortive halves and 3 cent, Half Dimes and a few large cents from her descriptions. An amazing haul that had been culled from circulation at a large urban retail store for face and kept for 30 years in a closet. I always wondered just what she really had. The one that got away, and may not have, if not for the sales pitch, of not rare, rare coins on TV.

In the world of Roman provincial coins nearly every one could be considered rare (certainly there are a lot where there are only less than 100 known) - some unique, but that does not make them astronomicially valuable.