*** Are We All Nuts? ***

My wife calls me a Numisnerd. Pretty sure it's a nice way of saying I'm nuts.

As someone with Asperger syndrome (nowadays on the so-called autism spectrum but almost unknown when I was a kid) I have always been drawn to collecting things. The quirks of the spectrum have left me verbally very gifted but not so much when it comes to math and numbers.

Despite this, numismatics is my main hobby these days!!

Over the past 40 odd years I have collected sports cards, antiques, jewelry, coins, toy cars, model trains, books, glassware, vintage hi-fi/tube audio, action figures, stamps, records, bottles, and quite a good many things besides those.

Due to the associated social anxiety/avoidant aspects of being on "the spectrum" as well as being type II bipolar, and having a lot of health issues, I did not attend many shows or social events when I was younger, but now that I've grown up a lot and gotten my health well sorted I am much more interested in hanging out with people who love coins as much as I do, and I try to go to as many shows as possible these days, both to geek out over awesome coins (affordable or not) and to bond with people who share the same love of shiny little pieces of metal.

In the past I've done metal detecting and bottle privy/trash pit digging (try explaining that one to the uninitiated) so I'm no stranger to people thinking some of my hobbies are weird!

One man's trash is, indeed, another man's treasure, and I think coin collecting is a pretty "normal" hobby, one with a long and storied history! To me, people who DON'T collect coins are the weird folks.

Paralyse, thanks for your story.

I am so glad that I am not the only numismatist with Autism/Aspergers Syndrome (I was diagnosed as an Aspie in 1999, but in 2009 I was rediagnosed with high functioning autism as my IQ was apparently too high).

And I bet you there are plenty more of us in the same boat.

Your post also reminded I do collect and have collected other weird things in the past - a new one is going to junk shops and buying old 78 records - which I have learnt how to date between the usual 40s/50s Hollywood type Bing Crosby/Sinatra stuff and truly old 1910s records!

Plus my book collection is pretty interesting too, a 45 year run of Consumer Magazines (NZ Consumer rights publication) and Heritage (NZ Building and Archaeology preservation) magazines from issue 1 in 1983 onwards.

So yeah, thanks.

Yes we are!





I also may be closing in on that as well, 70% of all my books are about coins though, the rest are astronomy or Colorado Mining and Railroad history. I have so many I had to get a storage unit 10' x 12' boxes stacked currently at about 6'-8'.

@princetane you're welcome!

Numismatics is truly a hobby that I am proud to be a part of, and I don't think it's weird; I think there are a lot more people out there who don't go to shows and post on coin forums, and those people are also probably as devoted as the rest of us. We should all be thrilled to be able to hold history right there in our hands.

As to how to bring the conversation to the general public, I've found that any good size bit of silver works nicely; kids, in particular, seem to go bonkers for Large Cents, Half Cents, and Morgan dollars. I've got a couple of rolls of junky cull Buffalo nickels I slip into change now and then, or hand out to customers' kids (although not more than a few of those customers have "borrowed" those nickels with a grin...closeted numismatists?)

I have a very generous family friend who runs a charity dealing with providing shelter and counseling for children from abusive families. In addition to owning a share in a couple of casinos, he works tirelessly with professionals and local businesses to secure more donations for shelters, and does his best to make sure no kid is left homeless on the streets.

Inside his house is an entire fairly large room devoted to nothing but Disney stuff. Posters, toys, collectibles, art, props, everything; the wallpaper is Disney; the furniture is Disney; the cabinets are full of Disney. The Disney bed has Disney sheets. The dishes are Disney China. It's pretty much a shrine to old Walt.

99.9% of the people who he meets would probably have no idea that this staid-looking businessman and casino maven is a huge Disney fan who travels around the country to conventions and anime/comic shows. They might even think that was odd, or weird, or not understand why he would spend presumably thousands of dollars on Disney items, some of them very scarce, or nearly unique.

But he also tells people about his hobby, and shows them his cell phone photos of his collections, and you'd be amazed how many people have at least one Disney-related story to share, and what a great icebreaker that is for building trust and getting people to buy into your mission.

Numismatics can be a conversational bridge as well -- find me a person over 30 in this country that doesn't have at least ONE story involving coins. I don't think you can. So don't be afraid to talk coins with strangers, at least on a general and basic level; you might be surprised how many secret coin collectors are out there.

People mostly all collect something. There are car collectors, How Wheel Car collectors and who can forget Beanie Babies. Remember those sport cards? It's just something to do.

...Wait, does Asperger's seriously have a low IQ as a requirement? That's literally the first time I've heard of that. Most Aspies I know of have fairly high IQs.

I never did a proper IQ test myself (that I know of), though if I had to guess I'd estimate that my IQ is probably somewhere in the 140s.
As a child, I kept acing all the tests; nowadays I feel a lot stupider.


I'm not actually sure what, if anything, I was diagnosed as; best I can tell, the actual diagnosis was "early infantile autism", which Russian medicine at the time (mid-to-late 1990s) apparently still classified as a form of schizophrenia.

Fortunately, unlike many other Russians with autism diagnoses, I avoided getting my diagnosis reclassified as schizophrenia proper at age 18 (probably because by then almost nobody really cared what exactly, if anything, I had in the first place, and most of the people who did care already knew what ASD was).

january1may - When they tested me in 2009, they told me in New Zealand, all their Aspergers patients had IQ's between 70 and 104 and there was over 100 of them. My IQ did not fit and yet I had a lot of the common behaviours of people with autism (I detest the term "autistic" as it means the syndrome controls you - not the other way around, you have it - it does not have you).

The latest debates is that High Functioning Autism should be renamed High Functioning Syndrome as it is not an intellectual disability and thus does not qualify as autism. It is bascially people with some quirky socially naive behaviours coupled with singular interests and obsessions (Like coins) and a high intellect but some poor social skills.

Unlike Aspergers and lower functioning autisms (Classic Autism, Kanner Syndrome, CDD and mild mental retardation) - High Functioning individuals like myself can learn the appropriate social behaviours and thus the autism can be self corrected. I have managed all I can without any form of medication.

Also HFA individuals are less likely to have it with other disorders like ADD, Williams Syndrome, Prader Willi Syndrome and Dyslexia.

I do suffer from Numisphilia and Numishoardaphilia though!