Curiosidness. How Often Do You Look At Your Collection?

Sits in my desk for months at a time, then get the bug and pull everything out, go through it... 'Wow, I'd forgotten I owned one of those'. Then, something comes up, get distracted with life stuff, goes back in to the desk for months. Or the mint sends me a brochure, gets me going again.

When I am at home I look at one part or another just about every day. It is a very rare thing for me to have everything out at once.

There are coins I pull out a lot to look at, and those that sit for years, perhaps decades, without me ever examining them. That experience has taught me a valuable lesson. It's not quantity that matters, but quality. Only buy coins that are going to make the list of ones I take out frequently.

I got lucky in that a lot of my "bad buys", that is, low-grade coins of no particular aesthetic value, went up dramatically in price due to the appreciation of silver, so they were recently sold off to buy far fewer, but much more attractive, coins.

I look through my collection every day. I have coins in albums, folders, those long red boxes for 2x2's, in photo boxes, cigar boxes and in recycled medication bottles. There's always something I need. I like to make checklists and do that quite a bit.

There's a poll running in the Canadian subforum on this topic.

With 9,882 coins in the collection at the moment, I find I don't have the time (or the table space!) to sit down and systematically view them all at once. I do, however, frequently browse through the collection, usually with a specific goal in mind.

As I posted in the poll thread, how often per week depends on where that week is in the month; I rummage through my collection looking for display items for the coin club meetings on the first and third Fridays, and the week or two before the first Friday I'm busy editing that club's Magazine which also usually involves searching for coins to help illustrate it. In between those times, I'm often looking for coins to post here on the forum.

However, as I go through my collection looking for specific things, I'll often find myself distracted just looking at the rest of the coins. Which doesn't help when I've got a Magazine deadline to meet, or a club meeting to rush off to attend.

I usually rotate my collection and only have a small part out at once... But the reading for the kings' throne is usually the Red Book, plus I keep an extra version in my glove box when I go "hunting"...

It depends...I've gone years without giving it a second thought, and then times when I couldn't hardly tear myself away from it to go to work. Get up,look at coins, go to work, get home, look at coins, go to bed and repeat. Maybe go to the bank to get more rolls to look through.

Lately, it seems like I never appreciate things, too busy with the baby and all, and a trip to the bank is too much of a pain, but it's nice to think that "someday" I'm going to go through and organize it all and maybe he'll be doing it with me.

I do keep about 50 of the more valuable coins in my safe, but the rest (about 3,000) are worth $30 or less. Perhaps over 1,000 of them would be valued at less than $1.

Having almost all of the collection out of the safe makes access to them far easier. Almost all of the coins I have acquired over the years comply with two criteria when first acquired:

1.) Is it really good value for money at the time of purchase? After that, I have never bothered with what value the coin may have.
2.) Does it raise my curiosity? That remains.

Since my aim is to collect coins of all centuries and cultures, from the invention of coins to modern times, you may well imagine that there is a vast variation in the coins. This sort of collection needs a fairly good support library. The books and research papers are the tools of the trade in my case.

For those reasons, it is always fun to review my collection. My collection also engenders curiosity and interest in the eyes of anybody else who sees them, who otherwise may have no interest in numismatics at all. It is a very easy collection to share a bit of fun with other folks.

Perhaps I should have saved all the money I have spent on the collection over the years and just given books on general numismatics away as Christmas presents! (I say that in jest!).