The conversation started something like this:
John: Bill, could you PLEASE get me a blog article by the end of the month?
Bill: On what? Coin market? Grading? The economy as it applies to coins? What?
I’ve been thinking this over for a few weeks now. Where does one start? I don’t know. I mean, there are a lot of things to discuss, but I was drawing a blank.
So I started doing what I always do when I don’t want to do something else, something that needs to be done. I started playing with one of my many collections.
This time it was one of the “weird” ones. Americana relating to coin dealers. You know, those that paved the way before us. Mehl, Stack’s, Guttag Brothers, to name a few. And then it hit me. While I had looked at this stuff many times before, this time I recognized a pattern I’d never picked up. I’ve got lots of catalogs, pricelists, and correspondence from the “Big Boys”. But I’ve also got tons of items from relatively unknown dealers, those lost to time. And guess what…most of it is dated between 1930 and 1940. Huh? The Great Depression? Who would have thought…
What does that mean? Well, I knew that game companies like Milton Bradley flourished during the Depression. People didn’t have the extra money. So they went back to the basics. Things that the family could do together that didn’t take huge amounts of money. Like playing board games. I just didn’t think about coins and the Great Depression. I had heard that certain coins, like matte proof gold, had sold for little more than face value in auction during this period. I guess the high face value must have had something to do with it. But I never thought about the meat and potatoes. The coins that the everyday collector wanted. Circ large cents, obsolete denominations, Confederate currency and commemoratives. Ironically that is what was selling seventy years age. Kind of like today…except for the commems.
Today, mega coins are selling for record numbers. Local and regional shows are filled to capacity with collectors looking for that special coin. Yet everybody is talking about the economy and the coin market. If you don’t have anything to compare today’s market with it can seem sort of scary.
Record unemployment numbers. Bank failures. Home foreclosures. Run-a-way government spending. And coin collecting….
So what does this mean? I don’t know. I do know that this isn’t uncharted territory we’re in. It may seem like it, but it’s not.
So get out your collection. Sit at the kitchen table with some of your family members. And enjoy them again. Both your family and your coins.

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