When Did Coin Collecting Become What It Is Today?

I think the only numismatic interest of kings was taxation

I have been looking through a lot of collections for several years.

I see a lot of old coin folders from the 1950's and 1960's.
Not very many from the 1920's and 1930's.

We all know the mint started putting out more proof come in the 1940's
and proof sets starting in 1950.

So when did modern collecting start for the commen man, and woman.

My guess would be, started in mid to late 40's ... Getting stronger by the
late 1950's.

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Not sure what the economic status of the collectors in the 1850's/1860's.
From what I have read, when large cents were being replaced with small
cents. Groups of collectors started trying to put together sets
of large cents. Can you imagine being able to get bags of large cents from
the banks and trying to put year sets together. That event might have been
the planting of seeds that brought on the modern way we collect ...
100 years later.

Collecting date sets of coins is a feature of collecting that only really got going after WW2.

There are blurred differences between coin collecting, numismatics and high value coin investment.
The core of these is numismatics, which at it's highest expression, is the scholastic study of coins and coinages.
Numismatics had it's beginnings in the renaissance, with the collection and study of ancient coins.

I don't think that I am high falutin' enough to be known as a 'numismatist'.

The collection of modern mint product that is commercially aimed at collectors started
when mints around the World saw that commercial opportunity, and actively expanded their efforts from the 1970's and later.

These days, the production of modern commemoratives is way overdone. Now, quite trivial events are commemorated with high quality NCLT produced in huge volumes.

In my opinion, collecting (as we know it today) caught the interest of us common folk in the 1950's when the 55 doubled die cent was discovered. It was a well publicized event and started the roll searching craze as new collectors eagerly sought specimens of the oddity the mint had released.

Earlier in that decade some interest had already been established with the low mintage 50-D nickel being hyped as a "rarity". At one time BU rolls of 50-D nickels were selling for 1000$ in the 1960's! The common man discovered he could make (or lose) money with this hobby of kings.

In the 1960's the small date cent craze took over and people spent hours searching through rolls for the elusive cent. (I was one of them!)

About that time, the mint decided to get in on the action and proof and mint set mintages became larger and larger each year as the demand skyrocketed by the new collectors. The mint realized they could make a boat load of money and
the offerings by the mint took off in the 1980's with commemoratives out the kazoos.

It continues unabated today.

Coin collecting started out because the kings / governments that issued coins were all financially irresponsible and debased their coinage eventually or collapsed as a civilization for other reasons before they got the chance to debase their coinage.

Coin collecting started because the governments started issuing new coins worth less intrinsically than the old coins, so people hoarded the old coins.


It is called Gresham's Law in economics if you wanted to read more.

I don't think it is a coincidence that coin collecting in the US got major bumps in the 40's (after making gold illegal in the 30's) and in the 80's (after taking out all the silver in the mid to late 60's).

Maybe we will get another bump when they debase the nickel finally, who knows.

I can fix that for you.

. . . .after the gold standard was abandoned and we inflated a bubble with money printed out of thin air, people got richer for a short period of time as we pulled forward demand and the associated pollution and climate change with accelerated demand.

B Max Mehl almost single handedly turned numismatics into a mass market. He advertised throughout the '20's and '30's to pay $100 for 1913 Liberty nickels knowing full well he already owned them all. He sold his Star Rare Coin Encyclopedia on which he made significant profits and sold many many penny boards which people tried to fill from circulation turning them into coin collectors.

The biggest growth was during the 1930's when millions of people had no jobs but could still afford to assemble penny sets. In absolute numbers the hobby just exploded after the war as people had much more money and baby boomers appeared and created the first big generation of collectors.