Hey Everybody! Look What I Have Here! (Showing Off Your Coins)

Most of my coin-showing-off is done at coin clubs, where the audience is likely to be more receptive to the material than a bunch of random people. If you try it and find that your dinner-table guests always get bored of you and your coins, can I suggest joining a coin club, if you aren't in one already?

But I do make an annual "coins and money" presentation to a Conversational English class that I volunteer at, and the young people there are generally not coin collectors or interested in coins. I tend to assemble three 20-coin pages which I use for my talk.

First page: history of coinage, and a general overview (my oldest coin, my smallest coin, my largest coin, coins used in colonial times, that sort of thing).

Second page: I try to bring along coins from the countries our students come from - usually old coins from those countries, that they're not likely to have seen before. This does need some cultural sensitivity (eg. try to avoid using WWII-era coins to represent the Asian countries).

Third page: "Coins with stories". Might be an interesting story about the circumstances of the coin's issue (like the Racketeer Nickel), or an interesting story about how and where I obtained it.

I try to downplay the value of any coins I display, even when some of them obviously are valuable (I normally have at least one gold coin, as well as several ancients, and people don't need to be told that such coins are valuable). I don't include any stories along the lines of "I bought this coin for $2 but it's actually worth $2000" - that just looks like a rich dude bragging about his money or, even worse, makes me look like a swindler who conned some poor ignorant person into selling me their valuable coin cheaply. I try to promote the truth that you don't need to be rich to enjoy coin collecting, and one way to do this is to be just as passionate in talking about the coin worth 50 cents as the coin worth $1000.

7070 Type Set would be a great way.

Surely they would find something in there interesting.

I do like the idea of "interesting qualities". With the correct audience, mostly children interested in history, I like to show them my 1804 Half Cent, spiked chin variety. Then I ask them to just think about history, and whose pocket or purse this coin has spent some time. Then I proceed to the minting process as it was in 1804. Agreed on the 1883 no cents V NIck. I love to tell the story of the racketeer. Odd denominations (2 cent and 3 cent pieces) are also neat when telling the kids about what 2 or 3 cents would buy you back in those days. Love this topic. Great way to introduce numismatics to the kids.

for non collectors I like to hand each one a 10 oz bar of silver, they are amazed on how heavy pure silver is

Well played!
Excellent!

Last Easter I had a niece and nephew say they were going to save the half dollars we put in the eggs for the egg hunt. So, I decided to show off a few of my coins. I showed them the off denominations first, Half Cent & Two Cent I had. Then I showed them the differences between a proof and circulation coins (Silver Eagles). After that I just let them look through my certified coins. Kinda fun seeing their faces kinda light up when they saw a coin they liked and ask a few questions about them.

Only a few family members know about my coins. My two sisters know I collect silver coins but they have no idea what I collect or how much I have. My two sons know that they will inherit their share some day. My daughter knows more about and has seen more of my collection than anyone else. That's about it.