How Do You Decide On What To Collect?

Numismatic pursuits will almost always be in flux--not a bad thing. What interests a collector--and why--is usually a personal matter. Do what you enjoy.

I have not been collecting for nearly as long as many of the members here but I decided early on that I liked the pure silver coins that were produced for collectors. My first purchases were American Silver Eagle Proofs, America The Beautiful Silver Proof Quarters sets and Presidential Silver Medals.
I now regularly collect silver coins from six different countries; US, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, Australia and South Africa. This gives me enough variety so I don't get bored with or tired of any coins I collect. Collecting BU, Certified and Proofs also adds to the variety.

You don't decide at first - start collecting then let time make the decision for you - it's a conglomerate of price, quality, and what you end up really liking that will make your decision. It's almost like "Predestination" !

I understand. I started with Wheat cents when I was a kid because we did chores for 25¢ - we would ride our bikes to the banks and ask for a few dollars of rolled cents then search them in the banks parking lot looking for wheats. Back then we didn't even know about key and semi-key wheats.

Funny how people start at different destinations and end up at the same ending.

Yes - moving forwards seem to be less "Coins" and more "Medals" - the good old days of collecting rare business coin strikes seems to be over.

It is okay to say you collect (coin) books more than coins. There is nothing wrong with that at all! I married a lady who collects books.

Well, I think that we really don't decide. That is, we don't (or can't) rationally weigh the pros and cons of collecting different things. It may just be a matter of opportunity, convenience, cost, or some random factor like a book or a lecture, assuming that we already have the collecting mentality. There may be something in your brain that finds something of interest from an esthetic or historical perspective and you go for that. Most of the posts here are dealing with American coinage, but the same thing applies to everything numismatic. The field of American exonumia alone is huge with many categories. If you add a worldwide scope it just opens up the possibilities even more.

As an example, one of my sub-collecting fields is exonumia from my city of Ottawa Canada. I started this a few years ago and I have 150+ items now. I certainly would not be doing this if I didn't live here, and as you can imagine, exonumia tends to be concentrated in the area of origin.