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How/where do you store all of your world coins?
Ziplock bags, by country, all in drawers. Silver goes in smaller bags inside the big bags. Sets and folders go on my bookshelf. It's worked pretty well for the first 2,000 coins.
Okay, time to recount my visit to the flea market last week! Once again I spent a lot of money. It's probably time to lay off for a while.
First, I spotted a little jar of foreign coins underneath a book in a booth full of crap. Luckily I have an eye for these things. Inside were mostly African coins, so I bought the most interesting for $3:
Also included: a new country for me, a coin from
Biafra!! Biafra failed to achieve any of the three words in its motto, as its three-year lifespan from 1967 to 1970 led to a civil war with Nigeria that killed a million people and Biafra lost. So, its aluminum coins are quite rare. This one is probably worth about $20 as they are not commonly seen on
ebay.
Possibly the nicest aluminum coin of all time... because most countries just don't care how good their valuelessly low denominations look. This Polish coin is a little smaller than an American half dollar and has a fisherman pulling up his nets. It's composed very well. Poland is commemorating past coin designs in their very attractive circulation "Dzieje Złotego" series, but this probably won't make the cut because it was issued by the long-suffering Polish People's Republic. As nice as its coins were, communism was a fairly bad time to be Polish. Poland was also the first country to overthrow their communist government.
On to the next booth: this was the "legitimate" coin booth that gets lots of business but still has terrible prices. They had a big 3/$1 tub, and I bargained the following down to $35...
Inside were some very interesting Austrian and Austro-Hungarian coins, a good buy for 33 cents each (hopefully). The 100 and 200 coins are denominated in kronen, the Austrian successor to the Austro-Hungarian corona. After a period of extreme inflation (although not as bad as Germany's) the krone was redenominated to the schilling at a factor of 10,000 to 1. So, 200 kronen became 2 groschen: and the two coins look exactly the same. Stepping back a little, the iron 20 coins are 20 heller and were issued under the last Habsburg, Karl I. Although German Empire iron coins are pretty common, Austro-Hungarian iron coins are harder to find.
Why did I buy 3 of these
Trade dollars? Well, they're good for public transit and downtown parking in Edmonton, and I live in Edmonton, so I won't say no to paying $1 for $3.
And I struck silver! A soldered Dutch coin and a really worn British sixpence are still nice finds.
Some interesting coins. Indian commemoratives are gaining in value steadily simply because there are so many Indian collectors, but no Indian coin catalog exists... yet. This is a business opportunity waiting to be exploited! The Indian mints have poor quality control and there is a thriving community of Indian variety hunters. Nehru's death in 1964 was commemorated on two coins (one Hindi, one English), but his 100th birthday coin is bilingual. He's just as important as Gandhi (they were friends!) because he was the first Indian prime minister, but we don't hear about him as much because he only did "boring" stuff like establishing India as a secular, democratic republic. Also, his daughter Indira Gandhi (no relation)
and his grandson Rajiv Gandhi (no relation) later became Prime Ministers as well, and this was done without any real vote-fixing (only the typical political powermongering that we approve of in the West).
I have one of these that's been holed and one that's in awful condition. Finally, I have a nice uncirculated specimen of this nice Italian design. Even fascism couldn't destroy the Italian's mint propensity towards really nice coin designs during World War II, and Italian coins are pretty lovely to this day.
Another nice find was this 1938 5-millieme Egyptian coin. Not only is it old and interesting, but it features a king with a fez instead of a crown! The European kind of heavy, cloying velvet-and-metal regalia would probably just slide right off any Middle Eastern king's sweat-slicked head. Besides, fezzes are cool.
Another new country -
British Honduras! I bet you're wondering what happened to British Honduras. Did it meet a horrible end like Biafra did? No, it was simply renamed to Belize, and the specifications of Belize's new 10-cent coins were not changed - so, this could have been taken from circulation yesterday.
A Romanian leu. This is part of the great post-war "Good For" series of coins. France and Belgium issued base-metal coins for denominations that used to be silver with the inscription "Bon Pour" or "Goed Voor", as if these coins would become silver once the economy improved (which never happened). The Romanian "Bun Pentru" is a bit harder to find than the first two countries, but any "Good For" set needs all three!
50 cents in its original packaging - this medallion was given to all Canadian schoolchildren in 1967, our centennial. It's a nice design!
Also: an Israeli coin-set ($9) from the historically significant year of 1967, when Israel fought off all four of its hostile neighbours (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). The country gained all that blue territory you see around the 5-agorot coin, which is nowadays the ostensibly-Palestinian West Bank and source of a million political woes. Currently it is being walled off from the rest of Israel, which is being internationally condemned - Israeli settlers are also moving into the West Bank in an act of demographic warfare to try and offset the region's Arab majority. So, tough stuff. The 1968 coin set must have looked a lot different!
$20 Columbian half... it's been cleaned and that's a bad price. Darn it!! Luckily there is some international demand for this coin. I am trying to wear off the light scratches in my pocket, with some success so far. There is an upcoming coin show in Edmonton (March 1 and 2, be there!) so I'll probably look for a problem-free specimen and get rid of this one, or try some kind of trade with an American who can find these for cheap.
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Posted 02/19/2014 01:26 am
200!!
