Is Type-Collecting An American Thing?

Are you saying they no longer exist
in your neck of the woods ?

I got tired of the boring filling in the holes with the same-looking coin. I like variety, so I stick exclusively to a type set for my US endeavors. Ancient Chinese is a little more free-form.

I am with TypeCoin. Other than my Kennedy halves (which I got mostly from boxes), I only have type albums for the different designs. And it may be like was said earlier the hole-filling type collecting maybe was more popular in NA since the foreign type albums all died out 40-50 years ago. But I would think in other parts of the world type collecting would be fun since there could be many countries right next door to you where you could acquire different ones.

Agreed, I think type collecting is a much more American thing to do. I had a friend in The Netherlands who did something that may look like type collecting, as he kept all the stuivers (5 cent pieces, 20 to the Gulden) and put them in a big jar. And then a second jar, et cetera. I usually started saving up stuivers for his birthday a few months ahead. He had a huge collection and actually started sorting them out, first by queen and later by year. However, Dutchies are so perfect that there weren't many known stuivers with flaws or oddities released in circulation: I've never seen one. I guess that's the closest thing to type collecting that I've seen around here.

I actually keep a set of each country that I visited or the predecessors of those countries or their coins. This is usually limited to circulation coins and already got me well over 100 sets now. I'm trying to complete most of those, just for completeness' sake, but just one of a coin type is sufficient. In addition, some countries that are a bit more special to me get a bit more attention, for example because I lived and/or worked there. In those cases I also try to collect one of a type for each coin in (recent?) history.

It's funny how perceptions work. I had always considered collecting by date an American thing and by type an European, well UK, thing. None of the people who I know personally collect by date, though most collect ancients or medieval so its kinda a moot point anyway.

Bacchus2, I think the distinction is based on the diversity of coinage. In the Netherlands up to the early 1800's each province had its own mint (with each province having considerable autonomy), leading to quite some diversity in coins. With the start of the Kingdom of the Netherlands coinage was unified. So for people collecting coins from the Kingdom, collecting by year is the common thing (collecting by type would mean you're done pretty quickly), while those collecting the pre-Kingdom, provincial coins tend to collect by type.

@Potsdam: Remember you also had Notgeld when German coinage was already unified. There's loads of interesting pieces there to be found, but most in tiny quantities.

@Dagaz: Remember that Yugoslavia had hyperinflation and civil war for a while, leading to a new currency almost every year. Between 1989 and 1994, Yugoslavia has had 6 different currencies (Hard Dinar, Convertible Dinar, Reformed Dinar, October Dinar, January Dinar, Novi Dinar). Good luck in collecting them all. :P

Exactly! To be honest, I only collect Notgeld from the former prussian region and 'collecting' in this case only means keeping them when I get my hands on such pieces. There are way too many different types, some of them being ultra scarce and therefore very expensive. They are a nice addition though and sometimes have great designs!