Today’s Wikipedia Featured Article on the (US) two-cent piece mentions it was produced “for circulation from 1864 to 1872 and (bolding mine) for collectors in 1873.”
I know there have been numismatists as long as there’s been currency but the idea it was an organised “thing” in the 1870s in sufficient numbers for the US Treasury to produce coins for them seems, well, strange.
It’s my understanding coin collecting moved away from being a Rich Person Hobby sometime in the 20th century (the first international coin collector’s fair was in 1962 or something like that, if a quick Wiki search is correct), partly because coins were useful units of currency until comparatively recently (What can you buy for 5c nowadays? Bugger all, but back in the day it would get you a bottle of Coca-Cola).
So, acknowledging there have been people collecting coins for thousands of years but not necessarily in an organised fashion, were there really enough coin collectors in the US in 1873 to make it a viable and worthwhile thing for the US Treasury to mint coins especially for the collector’s market?
Well, the American Numismatic Society was founded in 1858, so there must have been enough active coin collectors back then to organize themselves into a nation-wide group. Its British counterpart is about twenty years older.
From what I can tell, the American Numismatic Society wasn’t a nation-wide group in the early days - it seems more like a Learned Gentlemen’s Society (nothing wrong with that, BTW) based in New York.
Oh yes. Some of the most valuable US coins today were made when these collectors used political and business influence to get special coins minted just for them. I went to a coin show last year where I met a guy who specialized in collecting British coins with different monarchs on them (1200-1700). We met at this booth of a guy selling ancient coins, and just for the hell of it, I bought a pre-christ coin (Phillip II, father of Alexander the great,) and a 41 ad coin of the dude that executed St. James.
The short answer to your question is yes although firm numbers are hard to come by. One of the problems at the mint in the early days was people stopping by and asking to have coins struck they were missing. And some of the standard catalogs date back to not that long after the Civil War. Things really took off in this country, though, after the 1913 Liberty Nickel, the “up-side-down Jenny stamp”, and Hetty Green’s boy. Green and others ran ads offering outrageous sums for examples of either item when they knew they already had them all in their control. This started people looking closer at their change, small family accumulations/hoards and getting together in groups to swap and study coins. From there it just went nuts. Some of the “bingo clubs” (what super-serious numismatists call the more working class collectors clubs) today can trace their history back to the 20s and the whole 1913 campaign.
I would debate the 1962 date for the first international collectors convention. We have had exhibit medals and souvenir badges from international shows as far back as the 1870s and I have seen earlier ones displayed. Paris seems to have been the hotbed for them and they had some appeal to middle class collectors based on surviving reports and letters. In other words these expositions weren’t just for the King of Siam, the Grand Dukes of Russia and other famous coin collectors.
Even in this country you really need to look at the ANS (American Numismatic Society) more than you do the ANA. Their events go back to before the Civil War and by the 1870s they were attracting more “average” collectors in membership and to their events. I would suspect the first international show here like we see today (with a lot of bourse, exhibits and talks combined) would have sprung from (or been associated with) the ANS around 1890.
Sort of but not really. While its regular members were mostly New York, by the 1870s it was national and then some. And with the addition of the California gold issues and the interest in Civil War tokens, more middle class people were being attracted and admitted. Some of those “average joes” had the good material the guys centered in the east needed. It is my understanding that many of the early members around the country would form local societies where maybe one or two people were ANS members and the rest “associated” at least in name.
I love how delightfully ad-hoc a lot of things in the USA in late 19th century were - I’ve read of people being able to simply drop in and see the president, and random people securing relatively important government jobs with no previous experience of qualifications because they happened to be nearby at the time and so on.
The idea someone could drop into the Mint and say “Hey guys, I’m missing an 1842 [whatever], could you make me one?” seems hilarious and laughably impractical nowadays, but also fits in my my vague knowledge of how things seemed to work then.
Also, a huge thanks to kopek (wasn’t that a Soviet coin?) for his enormously informative response too. Most enlightening.
More early 19th century/late 18th. The closer we got to the Civil War, the more controlled and closed things became. And afterwards, because of the death of Lincoln, things really changed. But up through say 1825, things were pretty open. One collector, as a child around 1820, stopped in and showed the workers at the mint a couple of his prize large cents. After getting a tour and spending most of a day there, the employee showing him around presented him with a proof issue of an earlier date (1812 if memory serves me right) he was missing. As an adult in the 1880s he remarked on that as one of those “good old days” things that would never be again.
In Russian numismatics “collectors restrikes” are so common they have their own name/word (novodel) and at least four recognized classes. Make a coin, with government approval of course, from 2 original dies, its one class. Make one from 1 original and 1 “newly made” die and its another. Make it without approval and its slightly different. Makes it rough as Hades going by mintage figures to figure out how rare something is. For example, according to the book and mint records, there were 50 of the 1836 “Family Rubles” made. The problem was that someone in the 1970s did a census and found where 72 of them were. Oooops – Houston, we have a problem here. By the 1990s people had found records for some of the novodel production (official and unofficial) and it turns out there are more like 250+ of them — at least. Some people say 500+. Changes the rarity scale bunches.
Now you want to talk really odd, talk mules in numismatics. Mules are die pairs that never belonged together. Say the reverse of a 1793 chain large cent with a 1794 dated obverse. These can happen by error or necessity but often were things mint workers made for themselves when they got bored or were working on special projects like pattern coins. The people who made Soviet military decorations were notorious for this and mismatched versions of common medals are not that terribly uncommon. Most really active collectors have at least one example in their collections.
