THIS ENTRY DESCRIBES HOW I MADE THE CHOICE TO COLLECT FOREIGN COINS MINTED IN THE US.

I don't really know when I started collecting coins or how long I have been collecting for that matter. I belive it has been at least 15 years or so. I became interested while viewing various different coins being sold on TV. I was curious as to the grading terms that were being used by the TV host. I bought a book and was hooked. I put together various 20th Century sets in albums, I bought a great number of books and, more importantly, I spent a tremendous amount of time teaching myself how to grade coins. After finishing a Washington Quarter set I was looking for something different to collect; I was looking to collect something that was different from the usual series of US coins.

In August of 2004 while reading my copy of Coin World, I encountered the first of two articles by Eric Von Klinger entitled "Foreign Coins from U.S. Mints". The second installement followed in Coin World one week later. While I knew that the US minted some coins for foreign countries, I had no idea that the US minted such a large number of coins for so many different countries. Well I was extremely interested and, while Mr. Klinger did a great job listing the coins, I began looking for additional written material that would give me all the information I was going to need if I were to proceed with this series. I discovered that, while there are those in the hobby who collect US Government minted coins from one particular foreign country, there are very few, if any, that look upon all the foreign coins minted by the US Government Mints as a true series of coins, and this fact was made evident by the lack of written material dealing with this very subject.

I did manage to find one little small black book "Foreign Coins Struck at United States Mints" by Charles Altz and E. H. Barton which had, despite its small size, a tremendous amount of information. The other publication which which was of great value was a report put out by the US Mint entitled Domestic and "Foreign Coins Manufactured by Mints of the United States, 1793 - 1980". These two publications, along with additional books targeted at individual countries and the Standard Catalog of World Coins served to provide me with all the information needed to proceed with collecting this huge series.

This series will provide an incredible challenge for anyone who undertakes assembling this collection. There are over 1000 coins minted for 38 countries in this series. As I started to collect this series, I realized right away that a large number of the coins in this series are very easy to find, but there are also a great number of coins that, even though they may be thought of as common coins, are very, very scarce, especially in the UNC grades, and there are really just a large number of coins that cannot be found at all.

My collecting goal with this series has always been to collect the best examples I could find. For the first year or so I collected mainly unslabed coins, but as time went on I started to realize that many of these coins, due to their scarcity, needed to be slabed so that they would be properly preserved and be available for others in the distant future to enjoy. For example, I have only one coin from Costa Rica minted by the US Mints that is slabed, with every other coin being raw. Who knows, as time passes, many of the coins that are in existence now, because they are not made of silver or gold, may not be around for others to appreciate. So while a collector can go to a show and find an over abundance of US coins, many, many of the coins minted by the US Government Mints for foreign countries are nowhere to be found, and this is sad, because as time goes on, the chances of finding decent examples and preserving them for future generations grows smaller with each passing year.