COMPLETE HOLIDAY COIN GIFT GUIDE
dues” keep your favorite coin collectors from belonging to coin clubs. The truth is, every coin collector should belong to at least one club – ideally, two or more.
While membership in the American Numismatic Association should be requisite for any serious collector, it’s a good idea for a collector to belong to a local or regional club representing the hobbyist’s residence or area of expertise. For example, Floridian hobbyists should consider joining the Florida United Numismatists while all resident collectors of the Windy City belong in the legendary Chicago Coin Club. Those who love Liberty Seated coins should join the ranks of the Liberty Seated Collectors Club. Bust half nuts should, well, let’s just say there’s literally a club with their name on it (the Bust Half Nut Club – no kidding!).
Club memberships usually begin around $10 to $20, and the vast majority cost less than $100 per year. For the price of an ugly throwaway Christmas sweater, you can buy the numismatist in your life the gift that keeps on giving – membership to a coin club and, potentially, the key to a lifetime of numismatic enrichment unlike any online chat room can ever offer.
BOOKS
“Buy the book before the coin…” It’s a phrase one doesn’t go very long in our hobby without hearing. At one time, its meaning was considered common numismatic knowledge; before spending money and time collecting a particular type of coins, find out all you can about that coin type first. In more recent years, it seems fewer and fewer heed this advice. Maybe it’s because fewer people read books than ever before. Or perhaps it’s because so many collectors today think that everything they need to know about coins can be found online.
However, you just simply can’t “Google” all the coin questions and expect to always find an answer – an expert explanation, anyway. In fact, untold swaths of the sagest numismatic knowledge are still locked away in books, the only place even today where one can discover troves of deeply researched, richly delivered stats, facts, and figures about our nation’s coinage and the stories behind it.
That’s not to say the internet isn’t jam-packed with readily accessible resources for learning about
United States coins, world coinage, paper currency, and many other areas of the hobby.
But entire volumes of information have been written about some of the most narrowly studied coins and varieties – things that may never be transcribed to the internet’s digital realm. And it’s not just studies of niche coin types or obscure doubled dies that are confined to the pages of coin books. Histories of the mint, colorful accounts from long-gone numismatic luminaries, and ace-level coin investing secrets are elaborated upon in hard copy in ways unimaginable within the short-form soundbite-driven world of the Information Superhighway.
While bricks-and-mortar general bookstores and Amazon offer a limited selection of coin books, those giving the gift of a coin book might be better served looking to a coin dealer or numismatic book dealer. The latter is especially the case when seeking out-of-print titles or highly specialized new books about numismatics sure to never be found elsewhere. And, as with the cost of coin club memberships, the vast majority of the hobby’s finest books past and present can be had for the same price – or less – than any of the novelty holiday-emblazoned souvenirs that will probably just turn up at the gift recipient’s yard sale next year.
MAGAZINE & JOURNAL SUBSCRIPTIONS
Do you see a theme here yet? Clubs, books, and now magazines and journals. Perhaps some of the best numismatic gifts one can give are the things fewer people have been buying for themselves in recent years. Magazines and journals are among these.
And the decline in sales isn’t for lack of content quality. Today’s hobby magazines and journals are as worthy as ever, which is a fact stated less as a self-serving assessment of our bimonthly COINage publication and more as a respectful nod to the many outstanding publications produced throughout our hobby. Land a good deal, and you can score a gift subscription of a numismatic periodical for a fraction of its cover price. But even at full price, a year’s subscription of a coin periodical delivers an immense array of material to a collector that can only be found in the pages of a coin magazine.