Or how I added the S VDB for the second time.

Way back in the 1980's, the coin shop I frequented used to sponsor a weekly bid board that contained all manner of treasures and junk. One week, I finally spotted the one treasure, a 1909-S VDB, that I had been seeking to fill my Whitman Bookshelf Albums one remaining hole (not counting that 55DD or that 22 NO D). I placed a bid and found myself that Saturday Morning, when the board closed as the proud owner of that elusive coin, VF condition, paid somewhere in the low 200,s.

Flash forward to the early 90's and my whole collecting focus changed from Coins to Comic Books. In a fit of madness, I actually traded my beautiful little prize for a bunch of comic books and a couple of autographed pictures of baseball players.

At the time, the deal seemed like a fair trade but, as you all probably know, the bottom fell out of the comic book market a few ears hence while my S VDB continued to grow in value, in someone elses collection. My whole foray into Comics will forever haunt me, I think of the thousands I spent on Comics and related material and I realize those Thousands would have multiplied, not collapsed, if I had stuck with coins.

Flash forward to last month. I have been gradually converting all my raw coins into slabbed NGC, for the most part, coins in order to bring some order to my chaotic collection and to also build something my Daughter can keep or sell with much greater efficiency. I took a Dansco Type Collection Album to my favorite coin shop and traded that album in for an XF S VDB and a couple of MS 65 Walkers. The type album had a couple of nice pieces but mostly marginal material like a holed Seated Liberty Dollar and a slightly bent Shield w/Rays nickel. Even the 1846-O Seated Dollar had previously been declared cleaned and ungradeable by NGC, before details came along. So all in all, I am happy to have an S VDB back in my life and another big horde of raw coins reenters the market.

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