It's always more special when there's dramatic history attached to these things

I've got a 1929 Polish One Zloty coin... any time I pick it up I wonder who during the darkest times of its circulation might have owned it or used it; it almost feels as though it contains a power

Indeed. I also have a 10 Ruble (I Think) from 1913 and a 10 Yuan note signed by some members of the AVG.

This thread had me looking at my coin collection again and now I've decided to collect some Weimar Republic coins and Third Reich following on from that

I've already spent too much, and I've only been sending for the basic stuff... no rarities... that side of collecting never interested me. I don't feel the need to have every single year of a coin either... I'm not a 'completist', as they say

It's like touching history

http://i.imgur.com/QlQXsEY.jpg

A new $1 coin "Aussie Icons" series started last year.

http://i.imgur.com/zf0OYG3.jpg

Dame Edna finally made the bigtime.

My mom collected all the states, now I have to tell her she needed a full set from a single mint. lol


I don't do numismatic, only bullion. :D I'm kinda surprised to see higher percentage Canadian bullion worth less than lower percentage American mint coins if I trade them in. Especially since the Canadians have more counterfeit preventive measures on their coins.

How about one with Rolf Harris?

He's not a real Aussie. He left Australia many years ago and made his home in England, and only pays lip service to us back home.

We don't want him back.

I've metal detected for 26 years now so I have a bunch of them tho I don't considere myself the typical collector, just fill a coffee can and move to the next one.

Quite understandable :)

I found out something interesting about coins today: I always wondered why some old ones have a hole in the middle, so I googled and it turns out that these are usually from countries like France and Germany who had "foreign possessions" (also some Arab countries), where many of the natives did not have trousers to wear, so had no pockets to put their spare change in

Hence the hole... which allowed them to string all their coins together and carry them around their neck. What a stupid idea, huh? If you shoved your hand into a guy's trouser pocket you might be lucky enough to grab hold of a few centimes (hopefully nothing else)... but on a string?

A Danish Coin have also hole in the middle. It's their 5 Kroner coins.

Markus

Yeah, but you guys all walk around naked in the snow, right?

Collecting coins from the years of economic turmoil in Germany between the wars has also thrown up another aspect I'd not known about, namely the great number of different metals used in their manufacture at the time... and later during WW2 because of the need for good metals for the war effort

Aluminium, zinc, nickel, brass, bronze as well as alloys of these were used, with some coins having their metal content changed mid stream (like the early 50 pfennig which switched from aluminium to nickel... then back again once the war started)

When I was a kid, in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was not unusual to still see the occasional steel US penny in one's change; the steel penny was started to save copper, the usual metal for pennies, for use in the war effort...





<O>

As a 'casual' collector (of many kinds of things) most of the coins that have come my way have been 'modern' (i.e. 1970s and later). A friend who skipped the country to escape his creditors gave me his pile (he was a bi-polar hoarder) but it didn't contain anything that might have helped him pay off his debts... just modern stuff, some of them pretty though

However, if you look at what's offered by numismatists on ebay, you soon come to realise that in the old world there were some beautiful coins that you would never be likely to come across casually like this, or in the average thrift shop... like this old 10 centisimi coin from Italy

https://i.imgur.com/u8h5Gq7.jpg not valuable, just nice