Why Do You Collect? Not What, Or At Least That's Secondary, But Why?

A lot of us enjoy acquiring/collecting tangible assets. I think Conder101 has a point with the Hunter Gatherer tendencies built up in early humans. We humans like to hoard things and if given the chance we would all be like Smaug the dragon of J.R.R Tolkien fame with our giant hoard of goodies. What has changed is what people like hoard nowadays, some hard real estate, some hoard funko pops, others hoard coins and precious metals.

Condor's point made me think of my three year old son. He takes rocks that he finds outside and puts them in this special cup in his room. He's so proud of them, and likes to show them to me and my wife. Even at that early age, we do crave gathering things.

Why do I collect? Simply put it's because of the historic significance of the coin, medal, or token.







Here is an President Eisenhower Uncirculated Dollar in my collection with historic implications: 1) Gifted by President Nixon, 2) First Day of Issue (date on letter), 3) Letter indicates one of the first strikes of the coin 4)Letter shows President-to-Congressman provenance, 5) Not shown: Documentation from the Congressman's estate provides evidence of unbroken-legal-chain-of-ownership: President->Congressman-> current owner(me)->Any future owner (when I decide to sell).

My reasons have changed over my lifetime.

As a kid I started with the typical fill-in-the-holesin-US- WHitmans collection, and then branched out into foreign coins because of my fascination with world geography.

As an adult (and after a 2-decade hiatus), I shifted to several themes that had a more personal and/or historic context.

Across these themes, it never ceases to amaze me that I can hold in my hand a portrait of, say a 16th century sovereign, or a 13th century religious scene, executed by a craftsman of that era. It is as though I am thumbing through a museum of Western art in miniature, rather than a hobbyist's stash.

Probably they are a lot more productive and efficient than me.

And as an addendum to my original post, I should say that this Morgan and Peace dollar collecting is my second go around into the world of coin collecting. The first started about 60 years ago and ended about 55 years ago. It's an interesting story and it goes like this:

When I was just a boy around 10, I began collecting Lincoln Penny's. Of course that was about 1960 and most Lincoln cents in circulation were still wheat backs, and just in change you could find every year from 1909 all the way up to 1960. At the time getting an album full was fairly easy, and I did. I had one or two of those Whitman blue albums nearly full plus duplicates (some real rare ones alluded me). And I collected for about five years, and then being the foolish 15 year old that I was, I got a wild hair and thought I'd buy some nicer coin albums. I should have just left them in my old worn and torn Whitman albums, but being 15 and dumber than a post, I took them all out and put them in a jar, put that on my dresser and tossed the old Whitman's.

Now my stepfather was a manager of a restaurant and always needed change. Well he happened to see this jar of penny's on my dresser and estimated that there was probably 150 or so in there, and so took the penny's to work to put them in the till, and replaced them with three nice new crisp one dollar bills. He thought he was being nice by giving me more than face value. Needless to say, I eventually got over it after throwing a 15 year olds tantrum and berating my stepdad a while, but it sort of took the wind out of my sails, and up until about four years ago when I started collecting dollars, all I've done with coins ever since was spend them.

I thought the lesson was "always" buy a new album before getting rid of the old one :)