NGC -
European Numismatics: Attending the World Money Fair in Germany was a rewarding experience.During the previous week I attended the World Money Fair in Berlin, Germany. Over the years I've heard a lot about this convention, but had never been able to attend. My main specialty has always been
United States coinage and I doubted there would much to interest me at a European coin show. That has changed in recent years as my interests have grown to include ancient coinage. Also, as President of the American Numismatic Association, I wanted to find out why this show is so successful and look for ideas to improve our own World's Fair of Money. The World Money Fair is extremely successful, and I wanted to find out why.
From the start I could tell that Europeans operate quite differently than rare coin operations in the United States. The show is held at the largest hotel in Germany. The Estrel Hotel and Convention Center is giant, with over 1,000 rooms. I had not booked my room in time and they were sold out. It should be remembered that this show includes representation from every facet of numismatics. This means rare coin dealers, auction houses, mass market companies, world mints, packaging companies, coin supplies dealers, bullion companies, mint equipment companies (some with full scale presses on the bourse floor) and many others. The diversity is astounding.
Europeans love meetings, and this was obvious as soon as you entered the hotel. There were rows of tables in the lobby with people giving pitches on their wares. Nearly every meeting room in the hotel was booked by some large company and they were conducting non-stop meetings the entire week. A couple of my friends who do extensive business with these companies told me they had 30 to 40 meetings lined up for the week. Most of the meetings had been planned for months. The show did not start until Friday and there was a constant buzz of activity in the lobby from Monday on.
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Posted 02/10/2017 11:22 am
