Statehood Quarters First Day Covers & 2k

To mark my 2,000th post, I thought I would circle back to the reason that I stumbled upon this wonderful forum 3.5 years ago and post about it again with an update. Also commems gave me inspiration to spend a little time making a carefully thought-out milestone post with his recent 2,000th post in the U.S. Commemoratives forum (All of commems' posts are well-crafted and full of information, by the way).

Anyway, I was just getting back into numismatics at that point, and had purchased all the State Quarters First Day Covers back when they were issued. I still had them sealed in the white envelopes and my noob question was (something like), "will I hurt the value of these by opening them?" So I Googled around a bit, looking for some kind of coin forum/site/board on which to ask my question and CCF was either my first hit or the one that sounded the best to me. So I signed up and asked my question in this very forum.

I received welcomes (of course!) and a few mixed answers, mostly along the lines of "they'll probably never be worth what you paid for them, so no harm opening them!" Ahem. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have bought them from the Mint but I didn't know any better at the time. Also there were some answers like "What's the point of keeping them sealed up unless you plan to sell them?" And I did not intend to sell. So armed with that logic I happily ripped them all open and enjoyed them.

While overpriced at retail, I do enjoy these. They're rich in United States history, are educational, are a good conversation piece, and they look good in my bookcase (see below).

Thinking to myself that storing these in a shoebox was not a convenient way to view them or proper way to store them, I headed over to the Supplies forum to see how other people have stored/displayed these. Turns out not many people have (I guess FDCC's aren't all that popular in this forum), but I did get some great input from a helpful member who suggested a couple 3-ring binders with special pages that would fit two FDCC's to a page with front and back visible. Here are a few pics of how it turned out:







The 3rd pic is how they look in my bookcase (3 big blue binders on the left, duh). I ordered the binders with dust covers, visible in the 3rd photo.

Clearly I need to spend a little more time in the "Coin Photography" forum...

Anyway, I'd like to thank all the mods, pillars, forum mom/dad, and all other members for making this such a great place. I've learned a ton over the past 3.5 years and looking forward to the next 3.5 years and 2k posts.



P.S. This may not be the best forum for this post but it covers so many topics I couldn't really think of a better one. Mods, please move if you see fit.