General Issue Coins Or Commemorative/Manufactured Coins?

To clarify, I am coming from a type-set arena.

At first I was confused by your post.

I thought you were talking about circulating commemoratives. That is, coins that were made for a special occasion but actually circulated. A USA example would be the 1776-1976 coins. I consider these to be legitimate type coins worthy of pursuing or keeping.

If what you are talking about is commemoratives that are made just for collectors and were never intended for circulation then I don't consider them an interest. Part of collecting coins from around the world is that people from around the world actually used them! When browsing numista you can click a button to remove all of these.

Another gray area is a series of circulating commemorative coins, similar to the USA 50 State Quarters and successors. There are countries like Spain, Poland, Thailand with so many of these coins that I can't possibly keep up, and honestly don't want to. In those cases I might just keep one of each series as an example, just like I wouldn't be surprised for a foreign collector to keep only one representative quarter.

So I guess the first step is to decide what type of commemoratives you are talking about - circulating or not intended for circulation (NIFC).

-wheatiefan

Agreed, but isn't it a bit ironic folks tend to demand them unused?

Part of the problem is the lack of a clear distinction in some countries between "commemorative" and "regular issues".

For example, many countries have participated in the UN FAO "Grow More Food" coin programme. Are these "commemoratives"? To me, a "commemorative" has to, well, commemorate something. Some FAO coins were intended to circulate, some were issued as low-cost NCLT, with some of the profits from sales going to the FAO; most were issued in mintages so high it's impossible for someone who wasn't actually in-country to know whether they actually circulated or not.

Another example of ambiguous coins are the American "fifty states" and " ATB" quarters. Are they "commemorative"? If so, they don't seem to actually commemorate anything other than "America has states". So, does each and every one of the quarters belong in an "American type set"? The general consensus seems to be "yes, they do". And they're cheap enough and readily available, even here in Australia, so the only consideration to keeping them or not is the space required.