Looking Back on MY 70 Years of Coin Collecting

The End

Today I did something I hoped I would never have to do. I deleted my now much smaller ancient custom set. Due to finances I had to sell off a large portion of my ancient collection. Since I will no long have the financial means to meaningfully grow this collection I took the reasonable step of deleting that collection. I did however move my ancient coins into a much smaller custom set I have titled “Oldies but Goodies and other Pieces.” I was quite pleased when my Custom ancient set became the first ancient set that made it into the list of 50 most viewed custom sets.

I do have a never say die approach to collecting in that the day I shipped off my ancients for auction I purchased three more ancients. Since then I have purchased what maybe my last ancient for some time to come. I believe it to be a beautiful specimen of a Roman Provincial Coin (RPC) by Macrinus, the coin is from Moesia, Nicopolis. It is an AE26. The coin grades Ch XF with “condition scores” of Strike = 4/5 & Surface = 4/5. I have a special like for RPC’s in that they were produced at over 600 mints and were predominantly made of bronze. It is my belief that better bronze specimens that grade XF and better are not that common. In fact I just input “Macrinus, Moesia, Nicopolis, AE26” into the NGC’s Ancient Coins Archives search engine and 40+ pages of results came up, I check Page 1 & Page 40 (50 coins total) and not a single bronze RPC grade better than Good VF (Ch VF).

So for all practical purposes I have a coin collection but I have stopped collecting coins (i.e., growing my collection). Now what I am I going to do? I have decided to start a journal that discusses what I have observed and learned regarding coin collecting over my 70 years of collecting. If you have any topic you would like my thoughts on just let me know. As it stands right now I have eleven topics I wish to write journals on.

Take care

(Ram in VT)