Don't be shy

Do you consider the Philippine coinage struck by the United States for use in that country when it was a U.S. colony to be part of collectible U.S. coinage issues?

Many hobbyists do.

I expect that’s why I had a telephone call from a collector on Friday who was wondering if any advertisers in World Coin News, sister newspaper to Numismatic News, offered the Quezon commemoratives of 1936 struck at the Manila Mint.

The coins actually celebrate the creation of the Commonwealth of the Philippines in 1935. One of the peso coins shows the conjoined busts of the Philippine President and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Surely Roosevelt is of interest to U.S. collectors even if the rest of the Philippine colonial issues might not be.

I looked through the most recent issue of World Coin News while the caller was on the telephone and found an advertiser who offered the 50 centavos coin and I urged the caller to contact the advertiser to see if he might have the two different companion 1-peso coins.

He seemed somewhat reluctant to do so.

I pointed out to him that to list a coin in an ad, advertisers have to have a quantity sufficiently large to be able to meet the demand for listed coins. I suggested the possibility that the advertiser might have the 1-peso coins but did not have enough of them to want to list them and then turn down too many potential buyers.

The only way to know for sure was to call him.

What’s the moral of the story?

Don’t hesitate to call advertisers when you are looking for something.

Certainly try to zero in on the advertiser’s specialty. Don’t ask for Italian states coinage from an advertiser of Chinese Pandas, but beyond that it is fair to ask a seller of Italian states if he also has coins of the Kingdom of Italy and the republic even if they are not listed.

That’s why advertisers advertise. They want to be telephoned with questions like this.

Don’t be shy.