What’s to be made of a Mint report to Congress that basically asks for more time on the assignment given to it? Nobody wants to ask Congress to make important coinage decisions based on less than the best information available. Continue reading →

Does prestige mean anything anymore? What I mean by that is that when silver was removed from U.S. dimes and quarters in 1965, the half dollar retained some silver in it for prestige reasons. Continue reading →

I once had an acquaintance whose friends said he was a man with three heads. This was said half in amusement and half in mockery.
Why? It was because he always had three opinions about every topic. Continue reading →

When I was a kid there were no third-party grading services, no certificates of authenticity and no feeding frenzy over -69 and -70 grades. All the things that I had to learn as a beginner did not involve brain teasers like an inquiry below that was recently emailed to me. Continue reading →

Why are so many of the old large cents holed? Many have one hole, but I’ve seen several with two holes in them. Continue reading →

Russ Rulau was behaving like a kid again at the end. I don’t mean that at the age of 86 he had somehow lost his adult mental faculties, but he was showing the childlike enthusiasm that we all have felt about numismatics. It was clearly bubbling up within him the last time I visited him. Continue reading →

The great lesson of this collection is not how clever, special or wealthy the collector was. It was simply time. He collected his material and held it through thick and thin for many years. Continue reading →

He was a Ford vehicle owner. As such, he received a copy of the Fall 2012 issue of Ford Magazine. Being a collector, his attention was immediately drawn to an article on Page 7 that was so short it hardly qualified as anything more than a fun fact. But in his mind, what a fact it is. Continue reading →

The Mint’s new coin marketing should not be all that different from car marketing. Coin ownership and car ownership send the same messages. Continue reading →

The fate of the vending machine industry and coins have been intertwined for my entire time in the hobby. What the vending machine industry wants, it gets. The fate of all coins basically rests with it. Continue reading →