Not doing much active collecting these days, but I still pore over the 10 cent bins. From top L: Australia pennies 1936, 1942 Australia 50 cents 1978 (worth $.33 face?) New Zealand penny 1940 (nice condition) Spain 10 centimos 1878 Portugal 10 escudos 1988 UK pennies 1889, 1898, 1900, 1916, 1920x2, 1921, 1929, 1936, 1937, 1948 UK halfpennies 1917, 1928 Ireland penny 1935 China 10 cash Qing, Republic (I'd have to check the subtype, but pretty worn) Luxembourg 25 centimes 1946, 1947 Switzerland 20 rappen 1959, 1970, 1975x2 (About $0.20 face value each?) Germany 1941 5 pfennig France 10 centimes 1856x2 France 5 centimes 1924 (nice condition) Netherlands 5 cents 1979 (fun copper toning) Italy 5 centesimi 1922 India 1 anna 1918 Santa Clara VTA token, 1 ride Norway 1 krone 1966 Mexico 50 centavos 1965 Mexico 20 centavos 1967 Argentina 1 centavo 1985 Argentina 50 centavos 1952 Argentina 25 pesos 1965 Argentina 1 peso 1960 Colombia 10 centavos 1959, 1964 Nicaragua 5 centavos 1964 Belize 25 cents 1980 Brasil 1 cruzeiro 1943 Chile 10 centesimos 1964 Japan 100 yen Showa 44, 48, Heisei 3 Japan 50 yen Showa 46, 56, Heisei 8, 13 (I buy these for the face value) Canada 1 cent 1934 Lesotho 1 Sente 1979 Fiji halfpenny 1952 South Korea bus token? Nothing jumps out at me as a spectacular find, but 10 cents is a good deal for many of them, I think. Please let me know if you'd like a better photo of both sides of any of them. Thanks for reading!
Nice little batch of large pennies. For a ten-cent bin, that's a pretty nice assortment of stuff. Not all modern. One doesn't often find Nazi stuff or 1800s in ten-cent bins, at least in my experience.
Thanks! For this particular shop, I find his distribution has changed over time. For example, he used to have a customer who would bring 100 yen coins on trips to Japan, but I guess that guy retired or something. Now they go straight to the 10 cent bin even though they are almost $0.70 face value. I used to see things packaged in flips for as low as $0.35, but now they are more likely to wind up in the bin. It's probably just not worth his time to package low end coins any more. Also, if I ask, he often has unsorted bags that haven't made it to the bin yet which haven't been looked over much yet. Those have a much better distribution of interesting coins than the ones already out in the bin.
When I was an antique mall dealer, the older and more interesting (but still inexpensive) World stuff like that got put into labeled 2x2 holders and sold at 35c each or 3/$1. (My cost was typically 5-10 cents per unit, in bulk.) The more modern minors or stuff I had too much of (like early West German 1-, 5-, and 10-pfennig pieces, decimalized British and Australian, Eurocents, etc.) went into the 10c or 12/$1 bin, loose. I also sold loose US Wheat cents at that same 10c or 12/$1 price. Any better cherrypicks I made from my source bags (say, $3 and up) would be put out in fancier computer-printed flips in my main case, priced closer to catalog. The labeled, 2x2-holdered 3/$1 coins were my best sellers and sometimes covered my booth rent each month. So I have fond memories of “junkbox” World coins. Both as a cherrypicker and seller of them. I made a few nice finds back in the day. This was my small setup circa late 2007. The glass front curio cabinet had a few coin books and supplies like Dansco albums.
The unsorted stuff is the best. I get most of my new coins from that group nowadays. I only know one dealer that lets me do it though so I hope they stay around a long time.
@lordmarcovan Thanks for posting the shop pictures. If it's possible to feel nostalgic for a place one has never been, then I am definitely feeling it! The other local coin shop for me (sadly now gone a few years) would have a $0.25 and $0.10 bin on opposite corners of the store. Oddly, I had much better luck from the $0.10 cent bin than the other. I must have picked up hundreds of prewar Japan coins from that bin over the years. Photo was from a single visit in 2017. My favorite junk bin pick was probably this double tournois from the Principality of Sedan, Frederic-Maurice, 1634-38. It's very worn, but it is my only coin from Sedan when it was independent, and only cost 25 cents. The other thing I will try occasionally is to ask dealers if they have any weird, old coins they can't ID which they would be willing to sell as-is to me. For about $1-5 each, I've had some interesting finds. Thats how I got this countermarked City of Wiedenbrück 3 pfennig ~1692 for about $5 US.
You’d have cherrypicked the heck out of me on Japanese, back in the day. I seldom took the time to attribute Far Eastern and Arabic coins, due to the unfamiliarity of the alphabets. Cyrillic script wasn’t quite as intimidating for me, but Asian characters or Arabic “squigglies” often gave me headaches. Rather than spend a half hour trying to attribute one of those coins, only to inevitably find it was merely worth a quarter, I usually just let those go- loose and largely unexamined- in the ten-cent bin. I suspect a lot of other dealers do the same. I did try to attribute Chinese cash, sometimes.
Anything pre-WW2 Japan is decent for 10 cents. I like to look out for occupation money. I know the Manchukuo 10 Fen was a junk bin pick. (4th from L on top) Long ago, I was a Japanese/Chemistry double major in college. So I can more or less sightread the characters which come up on most East Asian coins. Older stuff like the seal script on some Song Dynasty coins is still quite a challenge for me. I went on to study materials engineering in grad school. Coin collecting is probably about the only hobby I could have picked that uses my background in chemistry, metallurgy and East Asian languages at the same time.
That’s a definite advantage. Funny how coin collecting can draw on or enhance other disciplines, isn’t it? Practically everything I know about World History and Geography, I learned from coins. As a lackluster, unmotivated student in my school days, I certainly didn’t hone those disciplines there. Only my hobby provided the interest which drove me to learn that stuff on my own. For that reason, as a dealer, I always tried to encourage young collectors in that direction, and always offered free samples to kids and teachers.
Now that’s a wild spending spree that I could enjoy and afford. I’d pay a dime of any cool coin. I like the George’s cuz they look old
I used to pick up all the 100Y coins I saw and most of the 50 and 500Y. I ended up with enough I could have gone to Japan on a vacation which was my original intent. I sold them in two big batches when the 100 yen was worth $1 and the other at about $1.20 Best of all is before I sold them I went through and pulled out anything interesting. Besides nice early date coins in AU and minor varieties I also found an odd one with no date on it. I still don't know what it is.
I used to get pretty good money for the British pennies. As long as you leave most of the nice ones and oldest ones in they were very popular. A lot of dealers throw in coins from cut up mint sets and some of these mint sets sell for thousands of dollars now days. A lot of moderns are underappreciated but they almost all are in circulated condition.
If it said something like "平成元年" instead of a numerical date, that means it could be from the first year of an emperor's reign. They use the character "元" (original) instead of the number 1 or 一 for the first year of a reign. Heisei 1 = 1989. Reiwa 1 = 2019 Showa 1 = 1926, but there wouldn't have been 100 yen coins yet back then.
I love occupation coins too. You and I like the same stuff. Until a few years ago I didn't pay much attention to Asian and Middle Eastern coins but then I took the time to educate myself and now I get a lot of good deals. And regarding your comment about finding better coins in the cheaper bins, I've noticed this as well. I think it's interesting what dealers think is good.
