Yarm's Journal

A journal by Yarm

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Entries in this journal

The Collector

A short story I was called in soon after The Collector was killed. It wasn?t an accident. The place was a mess so they told me to wear a mask. I held my breath instead. At first there didn?t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it all. I could be gracious and say there were piles everywhere but heaps would describe it better. But no, there was a pattern. Plastic items occupied one nook while another was almost entirely paper. I couldn?t even identify some of the plants near the entrance but the
Yarm

Yarm

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"When you come to a fork in the road ..."

My apologies to Yogi Berra but I came to that fork last Sunday and I took it. Over the last couple of months I had begun to explore what it might take to improve the small group of dollars I had in my registry type set (since dismantled). These were the remnants of a US proof type set I had assembled years ago and then auctioned off during the 90?s. Retired for nearly 9 years, I concede that I?ve lost some of my competitive spirit. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by how much a few carefully chos
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Yarm

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Part IV-Return to Collecting

Submission Obsession Admission Yep, I've got submission fever! Had I been asked even a few months ago whether I had any coins to submit to the grading services, the answer would have been "Maybe a couple that seem undergraded." That was before I noticed what was happening with US proof coinage from the 50s and early 60s. Now that I've dismantled a couple hundred proof sets from that era, the answer is "boxes full"! I had never thought of myself as a collector of proof sets-rather, I accumulate
Yarm

Yarm

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Part III-Return to Collecting

Auction results, Conders and "Hot Rod" Lincolns I had opted to use Teletrade to ease back into the sell side of the auction market with the minimum of work. My goal was to stay ?cost neutral? by selling off any of the coins I may have accumulated that don?t fit into one of my active collecting categories. In addition to my consignment of 13 ?old PCGS slabs? (which some collectors seem to like for their upgrade possibilities), my dad added the 1934 ?wrong metal? cent which he found in his chang
Yarm

Yarm

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A Tale of Two Norwebs

A neat post by TomB on toning and value got me reminiscing. I didn't attend the Norweb sales in '87 and '88 but the coins and the catalogues were spectacular! Many of the Norweb coins appeared afterwards at shows and in dealer inventories but some of the pieces were destined to be tucked away for a long time in some very nice collections. At the time, I was putting together a proof type set and came across this line in a dealer's lengthy inventory: "$1 1838 PR65". Really? (I had a thing for
Yarm

Yarm

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Part II-Return to Collecting

Submissions and certified auctions Well, I had to bite the bullet and submit raw coins sooner or later so I picked out a couple of "proof" British twopence cartwheels I had purchased at least 15 years ago. As near as I could tell, the designs were identical but one was coin turn and other medal turn. The scuttlebutt was that NGC might grade them but not encapsulate them (as too large for the standard slab). I had begun to experiment with photographing coins and figured I'd work with them uns
Yarm

Yarm

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Return to collecting

It's only been 12 years! Part I Back in the 80's I moved to Southern California and got interested in the coin market when certification was fairly new. I visited about 20 dealers in the Orange County area and experienced everything from outright hostility to patient education. I wound up purchasing almost exclusively from 3 dealers as well as the big auction houses over a period of nearly 10 years. I was working and didn't feel uncomfortable putting together a set of Gobrecht dollars, pr
Yarm

Yarm

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