There ‘they’ go again

All my life I lived with the “stigma” of being a coin collector when I am with family members.

They know it is my particular peculiarity that I also happened to turn into a career, but it remains no less peculiar to them.

I thought of this as I was wondering about what to write about this morning.

As I was checking various things that I had not given any thought to over the long weekend, I saw that the U.S. Mint’s current count of orders for the two-coin West Point silver American Eagle set stands at 208,725.

I have been waiting to see if the number will go beyond the 224,981 total registered by the 2012 two-coin San Francisco set.

I expect it will, but we will probably not see this happen until the very last hours of the set’s availability on June 6.

There are procrastinators in numismatics. That is a human trait any noncollector can understand.

What noncollectors might not be able to understand is how the rest of the orders have been placed since the set went on sale May 9.

In the first two and a half hours of the 2013 set’s availability, collectors placed 42 percent of all of the orders they have sent in thus far.

If you expand the figure to the number of sets ordered in the first 19 hours of availability, you find the total is 67 percent of all sets ordered.

Only a third of the sets ordered so far were ordered in all succeeding days after the first day.

Collectors might understand this buying pattern, but my relatives certainly wouldn’t.

That’s why I won’t mention it anywhere but here.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."