Yesterday's show in Baltimore was my first large-scale coin show. Here are my impressions of the whole thing.
First stop was the sign-in booth in the concourse, before actually entering the hall. One needed to fill out a Guest Registration slip, and show ID, before getting your little name sticker and entering the show. Given the megadollars worth of coins in the room, it's an understandable requirement. There was a bank of 8-10 doors into the hall, only two of which were open, guarded by a cop and a show representative.
I wandered in, looked to my left, then to my right, and paused to pick my jaw up off the floor. It was kinda like standing within touching range of the Space Shuttle - so overwhelmingly huge that one couldn't comprehend the whole picture at once. And, the room was L-shaped, so I couldn't even see all the tables from where I stood. Holy Toldeo, folks, there was a lot of coins in that room.
Many hundreds of tables.
I determined to split the place into sections, search-and-rescue style, and walk it in a grid pattern. Out came the notebook, to record show impressions and stuff I wanted a second look at later. This was a requirement, because otherwise I'd have maxed out my credit cards in the first twenty minutes.
Even with this approach, I'm positive that I missed many dealers.
Below are my impressions, in stream-of-consciousness mode:
- First, and most important I think, was the fact that I never saw more customers than dealers in the room. Although some booths were doing great business, there just weren't that many people there. I guess this is typical of a summer show.
- As a result, dealers were packing up by 1:00. Perhaps a third of the booths were empty by then. Some never opened at all.
Dealers - The first dealer to get a mention here is
Gainesville Coins. Firstly, because they're usually found in the Google Ad at the top of this page, by their choice and on their nickel, and as a result are part of the reason you get to read this post. Secondly, though, they're a couple of very nice fellows who have a real eye for nice coins, especially gold. As we talked, I was casually perusing their offerings (although not as casually as it looked), and it was plainly obvious that these guys could tell a nice coin for the grade. I don't think you would go wrong buying gold from them.
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Chris McCawley, who is in partnership with Bob Grellman, was the man to see for copper. That is all.
He got the only money I spent that day.
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Anaconda. Oh, golly. It is not possible to maintain one's composure when looking at Anaconda's stuff. Every negative comment I might make about high-end availability later does not apply to what I saw at Anaconda's booth. Just about every coin they had was of absolute knock-your-socks-off quality. I just left my jaw on the floor while at their booth; there was no point in picking it up only to drop it again at the next coin.
In a sea of eye-candy, one coin stood out, though - a superb example of Benjamin Franklin's Libertas Americana medallion. Words fail me. I spoke to Brandon for a while - he's a very personable guy who exudes a love of what he's doing, and how can you blame him? For the record, when I can take pictures of coins which match Brandon's for quality, I will feel as if I'm a good coin photographer. Brandon and Mark Goodman set the standard for coin photography; everyone else, including me, is still learning.
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Scarsdale Coin had a booth full of mouth-watering coinage. This guy definitely has a clue. He (I don't know if it was Jon Lerner himself I spoke to - idiot me forgot introductions) is soon going to receive the most cash I've ever spent on one coin, unless I talk myself out of it.
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Larry Briggs is a very popular man. At no time during my day was I able to muscle in to the crowd at his table to talk to him.
- I met and briefly spoke to
Laura Sperber at the Legend booth. She is as pleasant in person as you could possibly ask of a human being, and that's something you can't fake.
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Julian Liedman had a great spot right near the entrance door, a booth full of really excellent offerings, and too many customers for me to penetrate.
I apologise to the many other dealers who deserve mention; I just didn't write it all down.
Coins- Morgans, Morgans, Morgans. Everybody had Morgans. The currency dealers had Morgans. The World Coin dealers had Morgans. There are hundreds of thousands of Morgans in reputable slabs, I think all but five of them were in that hall, and I own that five.
- Given the current feeding frenzy over Moderns, I was surprised at how few dealers were actually hawking them. Eagles were plentiful, but there weren't half a dozen places where you could buy
Presidential dollars in slabs.
- There were a lot of fairly reasonably-priced Bust Halves in mid-grades. I could have gone broke very quickly,
- Bust 10's and 25's in lower grades were even more plentiful. It was darn near impossible to find them in XF and above.
- Seated 50's were rare, and not very appealing when I found them.
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Seated dollars were equally scarce, and priced accordingly.
- Almost all the copper I saw (and I went there specifically looking for early copper) was low-grade and overpriced. A notable exception was Chris McCawley, whom I've discussed in a separate thread in the Main Forum. The only plentiful issues were Braided Hair Large Cents; you could probably have found whatever you wanted in that category.
- You could bury a standing man under the pile of available low-mid grade
Mercury dimes and
Washington quarters.
- I found a whole lot of Barber issues, and vanishingly few nice ones.
- There was a sea of overpriced, run-of-the-mill gold. Hey, people, when gold goes up $20 you don't raise the price of an XF $5 Liberty by $40.
- The room was awash in low-end stuff. You could find anything at all in F12 or below, and lots of it.
Miscellaneous- You could hear the crickets quietly chirping at the
TPG booths. I never even found ICG.
- The overwhelming majority of dealers knew how to treat a customer right. I met some really great people on the other side of the tables.
- Whitman, promoter of the show, should have had a larger presence. They had about twenty feet of books and albums, and it took me all of 10 seconds to determine there was nothing I needed in their offerings. You couldn't tell the role they played anywhere in the show; I think they should have more prominently promoted themselves as well.
- A number of dealers had either the wrong name sign (some moved around), or none at all. What was your name again?
- I was never able to find a dealer map of the room. That was infuriating, because I had specific dealers I wanted to meet, and I missed some of them.
I entered the show at 10:15, a few minutes after it opened for the day, and was out of the place at 2:30. Overall, considering the hundreds of dealers, it was a little disappointing for someone like me, looking for XF-AU pieces for my 7070.
Posted 07/01/2007 3:07 pm
