Sharing Your Knowledge Nets You More

I was having a casual conversation with a friend of mine a while back, covering this and that, nothing in particular.  The conversation rolled around to coins.  Now my friend is not a collector and they know that this topic with me can suck up most of the oxygen in the room once I get started.  Sometimes I think people just ask to be polite. Kind of like saying “how are you today?”  You don’t really want to know all the ailments that are afflicting them, you are having polite conversation. 

This conversation starts with “How are your pennies doing?”  

How do I answer that?  I don’t call them pennies, I never have.   They say CENT right on them so I know they are cents.  Also, it’s large cents I collect, and specifically Victoria that I specialize in.

“They are great” I say, “I’m learning gobs from looking at them.”

My friend does market research for a living so she understands the concept of knowledge extraction from a data set.  In my case this means that I’m laying out a group of coins for study, cataloging them in a normal fashion for grade, and then looking closer at each coin to determine its particular characteristics.  These also get cataloged, the coin gets photographed if needed, markers noted and then the coin gets placed back in my ‘study’ binder in a fashion that I can find it again.  Every few new dies I identify, I need to print of the new photographs and place them in the appropriate place in the growing catalog.  This process of iteration takes quite some time to work through, but since there is no reference work for what I am doing this “catalog on the fly” approach does work.  The bigger my catalog gets, the easier it is to identify what I find.  The new die’s I discover get fewer and fewer the bigger my sample set grows.

“How will you share your results?” she asks.  “You can’t keep that stuff to yourself; you need to spread the knowledge around.”

This causes a tangent discussion on published articles, e-books, good old hard copy, costs, barriers, publishers, market size, demand, need, apps, Twitter, blog’s, social networks, copyright, copyright infringement, and a host of other things.  Eventually we roll back around to the coins.  Actually it’s the people around the coins we talk about.

I have a network of friends that specialize in Vickies as well.  We share thoughts and new finds back and forth.  We proof each other’s work when we are getting ready to publish books or articles.  We explore theories by exploring our coin sets against a hypothesis.  But it’s the larger population, beyond the specialists that’s important.  The bigger question for us is ‘what are we doing to share our knowledge’? 

The more I’ve found ways to share what I know, the more I have received in return.  I have met some wonderful collectors, specialists and friends.  I have all sorts of people I interact with in discussion boards with funny screen names. I receive emails for people I’ve never met asking questions on Vickies.  The more I share it seems, the more I get back in friendship, knowledge, perspective, opportunity and such.  Only in a very few cases with a couple of people was it to my detriment to share.  By and large the most rewarding aspect of what I do with my coins is sharing my knowledge.

My experience in this leads me to the following few points that I live by;

1. Respect others intellectual and physical property
2. Ask for help when you need it
3. Share what you know in a manner you are comfortable with
4. Write an article for a web site, RCNA Journal, local club newsletter etc.
5. Introduce your children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, the kid down the block etc. to your passion
6. Share your finds, but never gloat
7. Teach, you learn far more when you need to teach something to some one
8. Never just take, always give back

So, how are your pennies doing?  Find a way to let us all know what you are working on and what you have found.

1876 Study group and developing catalog.  The binder holds north of 500 coins all individually documented to build the growing catalog on the left.

Do You Specialize?

I was at a coin store the other day that I had not been to before.  It looked like a nice place and the dealer was pleasant.   As I was looking around at the mostly US offerings, (I live in the states) the dealer approached and asked me if he could help.  Cutting right to the chase I said “sure, do you have any Canadian large cents?”  This question usually brings an answer of “no, sorry, what else do you collect?” Sometimes I get “yes I have a few here somewhere”.  That response is usually followed by some rummaging around to produce a handful of low grade common date stuff anywhere from 1859 to 1920, with the emphasis on George.

This particular day, I got asked some qualifying questions in return.  “What dates are you interested in?  Are you looking for grade or circs?  I think I have a few certified as well, are you interested in those?”  OK I seem to be interfacing with a dealer that has stock.  This is unusual for me.  His questions really forced me to get more specific in my wants. 

“I’m really just looking for Victoria” comes my response.

He counters “What dates do still need?” OK, I’m going to have to get more specific. 

“I don’t really need any dates, I just collect Victoria.” 

“Oh, I have a selection of better grades, would you be interested in those?”

“It depends on the date.” I say.  At this point he is continuing to be very nice as he attempts to pull out of me what I actually want.  I find myself almost frustrated. Not at the dealer, but at the fact that I apparently don’t seem to know what I want.  I’m going to have to step up my game here.  “I’m focused on earlier dates at the moment, anything from 1858 through about 84 or so”.

“Ah, I have a number of 1859’s and some of the earlier ones, all circs, is that OK?”

“Yes that would be great!”

As he heads to the back room to get the appropriate box, it occurs to me that there are easy groupings that large cents fall into.  It’s not just that I am a large cent collector; I have groupings that I seem to pay attention to.  For instance I will by George, but I tend to stay BU.  Almost the same for Edward, I work AU and up.  These are nice groupings and one could easily specialize by king.  For Victoria, well, she seems to fragment much the way Liberty does on early US copper.  For Victoria, the groupings that seem natural to me are;

1858 – This is an outstanding variety year to collect.  Rob Turner has opened the collecting world’s eyes to this group.  The drawback is the coins are not pocket change.  Most collectors have 1 or 2 of these, not gobs of them.  I’m working on a variety set so I have several at the moment.

1859/8 – This is the short series.  There are only a few varieties in this group.  I had a full set of all the Obv. and Rev. combinations until Rob Turner published 1 other.  I’m in the hunt for it now as well.

1859’s – I’m not sure what to say about this group.  There are so many different ways that one could collect this date it is almost a single collecting focus in itself.  Brad Gravestone did a ton of work on these and Dr. Jim Haxby is currently in the process of publishing the die varieties.  For me, I like the re-punched 9’s and 5’s

I want to break the Dominion group by Obverse but I find that too restrictive so here is how I see it.

Obv. 1x – All the Obv. 1, 1a, 1a/1 coins from 1876 to 1886. This is a nice 5 year group with some spectacular varieties to look for.  Since the 84 and 86 Obv. 1 and 1a coin are single dies for those years it is really a 3 year group.

Early Obv. 2 – I group the 1882-1887’s together as well as the Obv. 2/1 stuff.

1888 – I see this as a great opportunity for study.  We all know that there are tons of repunched 8’s and the mintage numbers mean that we won’t be finding them all for a while.

Obv. 3 - All 3 years

1891 – All combinations of Obverse and reverse. There are lots of varieties here if you wanted to go for the entire set.  You’ll need a guide for this.  Look to Rob Turner for this series.

All Others – This groups coins from 1892 forward to 1901.  I used to think that there was not much going on here but there are lots of double punched numbers in the dates and various date spacing’s.

Heaton – Collect just H coins including the 1907

Is it any wonder that I had a hard time articulating what I wanted to look at!  I ended up buying some nicer circ 1859’s and an 81.  I’ll need to be more prepared next time I visit this particular shop. It’s nice to have choice but sometimes you really need to have focus on what your targets are.  Specializing in certain areas of large cents can be an outstanding way to broaden your collection.  Pick an area and dive in!