RSS Feed

Posts Tagged ‘wk16’

  1. Coins Galore

    March 21, 2014 by Melissa Shallcross

    Find me in an antique store, and I’ll probably stay there til I’m an antique myself. There’s just something about walking around, searching through piles of treasures, from paintings to old toys and classic soda machines, that gets me so entranced. No doubt this hobby of going to antique stores stemmed from my grandfather and his garage that I talked about before. And my parents love to go through antique stores, too. My absolute favorite things to hunt for in an antique store, though, are coins. World coins, to be exact.

    http://www.wallpapersshop.net/wallpaper/coins-of-the-world/

    http://www.wallpapersshop.net/wallpaper/coins-of-the-world/

    I get a thrill from finding a box full of world coins sitting in a glass cabinet at an antique store. My favorite shop I go to over in Lancaster, PA has boxes and boxes full of world coins, starting at fifty cents a piece. Now, honestly, I don’t go hunting through these coins like an expert or anything. I’m not researching the years and mint date of coins from tons of different countries. I’m not really looking to find a jackpot of a coin, something worth hundreds of dollars, although that can be nice sometimes. What I look for in those old wooden, dirty boxes labeled $.50 is beauty and history.

    The feeling I get from picking up a coin from another country, another century, is completely indescribable. The idea that I can hold a piece of history and culture that survived both the World Wars, or kept itself in pristine condition after a century and a half, or depicts someone once infamous or not fully remembered, is amazing to me. My sister shares my passion for collecting world coins, and I can tell she thinks I’m crazy for picking out old, dented coins with holes drilled into them and the wording and etchings barely readable. But the thing is, I feel myself holding so much personal history in those coins. How did it get to be like this? Who drilled into the coin? Were they making a necklace? Was this a prized possession of theirs?

    Of course, I don’t just love those worn out coins. As with all of my world coins, I love to think about how they could have gotten to be where they are now, sitting in my hand at an old antique shop in the middle of PA. One of my favorite coins is one of the oldest I own, from 1821. It’s almost 2 centuries old! And it’s from South America! How could this old coin have possibly survived this long and how did it get here? I love to think about all of that.

    http://www.portlandcoins.com/products/coins

    http://www.portlandcoins.com/products/coins

    However, one of my favorite things about world coins is the culture you can see. Different etchings of royal seals and national animals and so many different languages and styles and calendars. Different thicknesses and edges, various symbols and materials. I could sit and stare at my coin collection forever. Researching my coins is so intriguing, finding out the political and historical background of when the coin was born.

    Even though most of my coins probably don’t cost any more than what I paid for them, they’re still valuable treasures to me.  And hey, you never know, one day I might stumble upon a coin in the $.50 box that’s worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars! You never know, and that’s just one aspect of the thrill of the hunt!


Skip to toolbar