. . .
. . .
by Scott Wilson, 6 Mar 1995
I had a good time at the ANA Early Spring Show in Atlanta. I spent most of my time on the bourse floor. The bourse was actually not much larger than my previous record, the Peach State Coin Show, usually held in the adjoining building. I consciously limited myself to spending no more than $100. The first things I bought were books. Usually, I browse any book dealers late in the day when I have no money left, so this time I wanted to give them a fair shot first. I was surprised since there was only one book/supplies dealer there, Stone Mountain Supplies, who I've seen at numerous shows. I bought three books, one on the life of Thomas Simon, an engraver for the Royal Mint, a Spink book on coins of the British Empire, and Chinese Cash by Creswell. The Chinese cash and Simon books were 25% off, which was nice.
Unfortunately, this meant I was carrying around an arm-load of books for the rest of the day. Getting my bearings on the floor, I pressed on. There was a section of tables on ancients and foreign coins, so I scanned there pretty heavily. I had my best luck, though in the "less than $499" section. There, I managed to buy three Wilkinson halfpenny tokens from one dealer. It was fairly crowded at his table. I noticed many people who wanted to sit and flip through boxes. There were four or five tables that were covered with nothing but boxes of 2x2's: these seemed to be some of the most popular tables there, and chair space was at a premium.
I went back to the ancients/foreign section, and this time I started talking to people. The Classical Numismatic Group table was pretty fun. They had some coins from their upcoming auction on display. They had a nice Northumberland shilling in the 'for sale' side, which I had never seen before. No one at the show had any high-grade Hong Kong coins, either. I talked to a dealer who said he had helped catalog the upcoming Goodman sale for Superior. He said those coins were pretty amazing. I asked him if they were mostly patterns and proofs. He said no, there were dozens of regular issue dollars and half dollars too.
I had a nice long conversation with William Paul of American Heritage Minting. We talked about the coins market and slabbing. He was saying that the services usually overgrade English and French coins, to the long-term detriment of the hobby, although it's possible to sell over-graded coins on services like Teletrade for a profit.
At 2:30, I went to the netters meeting. A total of 8 people showed up. I met Bob Leuver (Executive Director of ANA), Ken Bressett, Joe Minieri, Gordon White, Terry Armstrong, and some others. (Forgive me if I got your name wrong, or left you out.) We talked for about an hour about the ANA, Prodigy, AOL, WWW, etc. The ANA will soon open its own homepage. To everyone who was there, thanks for coming. In the future, each major show will probably have its own homepage, set up for just that event, IMHO.
One other dealer I had a fun time at was Allen Berman, from Fairfield, CT. He had a large potpourri of world coins, but most interestingly, he had all of the new issues from Eastern Europe. I bought a set of current issues coins from Slovenia, which I have visited and enjoyed very much. I also bought the set of 9 current coins from Croatia. I really liked the Slovenian designs. Each coin has an animal with its latin name. The biggest had the head of an Ibex, which is like an antelope with very long horns. The others have salmon, a bee, an owl and a salamander. They are all very pleasing to look at. The Croatian ones are good to. The largest denomination has a bear, followed by a tuna. The small denominations have plants. I liked the smallest one; it has a couple of ears of corn.
All in all, I had a good time, except for the drive. In a way, I'm looking forward to the medium-sized shows, since the dealers bring more than just their knock-out gems. Once I become a serious spender (when was that again?), the ANA-sized shows will probably be more to my liking.
Scott Wilson
. . .