How Wise Do You Believe Our Current Market Standards To Be?

Those kinds of errors aren't really interesting to me, but in general, I buy based on eye appeal, so I am willing to overlook minor problems such as light cleaning.

I don't like coins that have been obviously altered in an unnatural way. Harshly cleaned coins lack eye appeal. Dipped copper in general lacks eye appeal to me. A lightly cleaned silver coin doesn't look much different to me than a silver coin that gets "cleaned" by passing through people' hands. I guess what I am saying is that I don't get fixated on looking at a coin with nice eye appeal under a 10x loop and declaring "I think I see a hairline or two - it's junk".

Just my opinion.

No longer. Numismatics is aware of its' responsibility to the future these days. It's why we work so hard here on drawing the line between "conservation" and "cleaning," and equally hard on teaching people to conserve when appropriate. This is museum stuff, held in our hands. We owe the future.

I have to assume they will Celtic.

I can hear them now...

"Aww man this one had an awesome cleaning with a wire brush. I gotta have it".

Lacquering coins was an altruistic effort to preserve coins for the future 150 years ago. Heck, it would still work perfectly today. This commitment to the future is not new, just our ability to easily educate new collectors regarding it. That won't change.

In an age before airtight plastic containers, lacquering or waxing was all you could do to protect a coin from oxidation. So in that sense, lacquering was the 19th century equivalent of slabbing and, as SsuperDdave said, it worked just fine. If there are 150+ year old copper coins that still look anywhere near mint-fresh, it's almost certainly because they've been lacquered for most of their history. Lacquering works even better than slabs at keeping the air out, the only downside was potential chemical reactions with the lacquer itself.


Not entirely. Part of the reason why collectors pay a premium for "crusty" coins today is that so few of them were allowed to remain "crusty"; most were cleaned. Never-cleaned coins are therefore the rare exception. This will not change. However, as the fraction of never-cleaned coinage continually decreases over time (because the well-meaning non-collectors who inherit collections are constantly at work destroying more and more original coins) then I suspect tolerance for once-cleaned coins will increase. At the far extreme of this, the people who collect ancient coins expect their coins to have been cleaned, and even happily pay a premium to people who do a good, market-acceptable cleaning job.


If you want to be thought of as a collector with foresight, cutting-edge, ahead of their time, then here's what to do: find something that nobody today collects or is interested in, and collect those. Of course, collecting things that the "in crowd" turn their noses up at would be considered odd, unusual or even bizarre by modern collectors, so the downside of this is you won't be popular with your fellow collectors of today. You are correct in pointing out that the fashion with error collecting is a relatively new phenomenon; people 100 years or more ago who collected error coins would have been considered oddball eccentrics.

Another advantage of collecting the currently-unpopular is, of course, that such material is usually comparatively cheap. I'll give you a good historical example: people who collected Franklin Mint products in the early 1980s, after the Franklin Mint bubble burst and their "mass-produced junk" was sitting around in the scrap bins. Nobody wanted the stuff and people turned their noses up at it. You could get FM coins and medals for only a fraction of their original issue price, as dealers were flooded with the things. Anybody that actually bought up FM stuff back then, and took good care of it as opposed to following the FM's defective instructions on "How To Take Care Of Coins", is sitting on a gold mine now.

The trouble is, figuring out which "modern junk" is going to become the gold standard of collectability in a few generations time, because sometimes "modern junk" merely becomes "old junk" (I'm tempted to offer "Phonecards" as an example here, but I won't - it's still too soon to write them off just yet). All I can advise is to collect something that you like and enjoy. That way, even if you're considered an eccentric your whole life and beyond, at least you had fun while you were doing it.


No, not really. I would be very surprised if my collection were still intact in a hundred years. I'm certainly not going to change my collecting behaviour today based on my assumptions about what hypothetical future-people might think about me.