Reflections with Contributors

In the early 1970s, I was involved with the projected Standard Catalog of World Coins and happened to be at the Krause headquarters in Iola in the summer of 1973. The World Coin News publication was then being discussed, and it was interesting to learn of the many plans for the magazine. Because of my work on the Standard Catalog, it was natural to begin writing for World Coin News within a relatively short time. I have worked with a number of editors and staff writers over the years, but perhaps the most memorable was Colin Bruce, whose desk was always piled very high with papers relating to his numerous projects. There have been many changes over the years to the format of the magazine, always for the better. As world coins themselves change, I expect to see further improvements in World Coin News. It has been a great pleasure for me to be part of this magazine since its founding.

 - R.W. Julian

I lost track a long time ago, but I’ve been associated with World Coin News since at least the turn of the 21st century. I’ve seen a lot of things change during that time. WCN was owned by Krause Publications when then editor Dave Harper first asked me to write a monthly column on the latest coin news coming out of Canada. Since that time, that suggestion has morphed into the Around the World monthly numismatic rather than merely a coin-collecting column that I now write in addition to my Coin Clinic column, where I address readers’ questions and answers.

I’ve seen the publication be purchased by F & W, then by AIM (Active Interest Media), the current owner. My Around the World column has evolved from being something through which you might expect new coin issues exclusively to appear to become a truly numismatic column in which the nuts and bolts behind both new and old issues and why they are important are addressed.

Yes, I like shiny new coins made for collectors rather than to be used as money, but numismatics is the study of money and its relevance, not just being viewed as something to collect. While from a macroscopic view, there is importance to some of the new coin issues, not all current or past coinage meant to be used as money has a numismatic story to tell. I try to treat coins as more than something to collect. These are physical objects that represent something, perhaps socially, historically, economically, or even more. Coins may tell us about past civilizations, trade routes, almost forgotten monarchies, or wars. Coins, both new and old, can deliver propaganda messages.

Upon Alan Herbert’s retirement, I took over his WCN Coin Clinic column. This quickly expanded to involve his weekly Coin Clinic column in Numismatic News as well. From there, I somehow also took over the U.S. coin pricing appearing weekly in Numismatic News. This might have come as a surprise to some people since I am known primarily as a collector of ancient coins. What may not be as well known is that I spent many years as a coin dealer in addition to being a numismatic writer. My primary audience was for U.S., not for foreign or ancient coins. My WCN columns don’t ignore U.S. coins; the columns simply put U.S. coinage into perspective in the same way as I do with any other coins (or bank notes) of the world.

If I have any real concerns, it would be that I could be asked to take on cleaning the windows and taking out the trash as additional tasks.

World Coin News has remained an important vehicle through which the overall view of coined money can be understood. You can consider WCN to be a 20th-century publication that has survived into the 21st century. However, the truth is that. WCN has evolved continuously and, for that reason, is still an important source of information in the 21st century. Coin collecting is changing. So is WCN news.

I have joked that our headquarters is publisher Corinne Zelke’s living room coffee table, but this may not be as far from the truth as might be imagined. WCN is a 21st-century publication, or if you like, a source of information. WCN is available online as well as in hard copy print. The staff and its contributors work from remote locations, as work has evolved in so many other fields of employment.

Both the full-time staff and we, who are contributors, share a passion for numismatics and coin collecting. I doubt any of us would be involved with WCN simply for employment. WCN is now celebrating its half-century mark. I look forward to WCN continuing to adapt as coin collecting and money in general change throughout the 21st century, remaining as an important source of information for not only coin collectors but for anyone who might take an interest in coins approaching coins from any number of other disciplines as well.

 - Rich Giedroyc

I lived in a state once where if you had a 25-year-old car, you could get an “antique” license plate. I was in my thirties then, and I considered that if I was a car in that state, I’d be an antique.

That was forty years ago, more or less.

I started writing for World Coin News in 1989. I was a dealer in international numismatics, my specialty was Asia, and “odd stuff” in general.

I noticed that there was a boom going on in Thai coins. It was interesting. The price of some Thai coins started to go up, and people in Thailand got them out of their closets and pots in the ground and brought them to dealers, who sold them to collectors at prices that were higher still.

Before the boom, there was approximately one coin dealer in Thailand who sold outside the country to any degree. Several other dealers got into the business as the boom progressed. But there also got to be more collectors in Thailand itself. There have been a few Thai collectors since the late 19th century. Most were big shots of various kinds. Sometimes they were big enough that they could get something special made at their behest by the mint. Suddenly, in the late 1980s, there were a lot more.

The Royal Thai Mint got into the act, making more and more commemoratives, including in gold and silver, to sell to the new collectors. Money got made.

I wrote the then editor of World Coin News and asked if they'd be interested in an article on that phenomenon and on Thai coins in general. They said sure. I wrote the article. They paid me. I thought that was pleasant.

I asked them if they'd be interested in similar articles on, say, every country in the world. Well, they said, yes, go ahead. So, I did, and this has continued, basically without a break, until this very day.

That was before the internet. Before a lot of things, actually. There weren't even many slabs around back then. PCGS and NGC had only been around for a few years. Most world coins were raw. There were a lot fewer laws relating to coin collecting. International shipping costs were, I guess we could say, affordable.

And nothing much was going in or out of Russia and China or their satellites and associates. Nothing going in, nothing coming out. That was still a couple of years away.

The Thai coin boom lasted about a year.

Booms in the coins of a particular country usually are related to a bloom of interest by collectors in that country. Typically, back then, in a boom, the price of everything would go up, and rare stuff would come out and get bought. The “general public” would get into it late, there’d be a market peak, then a “retrenchment,” and then the general public would lose interest. Prices would drop, though not as low as they had been when nobody cared. Rare things would be harder to find, cheap stuff sat around, losing value.

There were other booms: Japan. Korea, Spanish colonial cobs, highlighted by those sea salvage treasure finds, German, Russian, Indian, and Chinese (longest boom ever, twenty years plus, still going on, there are probably more coin collectors in China than in the whole rest of the world combined).

Things are a bit different now. The internet has made it so that everyone, at least everyone who uses the internet, knows what everything is worth. There are still lucky finds, but the first finder knows what it’s worth, and so does everyone else in the world.

The big change these days is that lots of people no longer use coins at all.

World Coin News has been a constant presence in my numismatic career. The periodical print outlet of the company that made the Standard Catalogs of World Coins, the catalogs that everyone used to make sense of their modern world coin collections, has constantly and consistently brought a high level of observation and commentary to the field.

The printed Standard Catalogs grew to four volumes, arranged by century. They took up a lot of space on the shelf, but they were essential if you wanted to be involved in world coins. I used them all the time. Some things were missing, 19th-century odd-shaped stuff from Southeast Asia and Indonesia mostly, 17th-century minors, but for most of the world, they were astonishingly comprehensive and useful.

My editors were great, all of them. They mostly let me write whatever I wanted. I can only remember one time when they changed and/or deleted something. Wasn’t important. A satirical political comment on something that made sense at the time, but today nobody today would know what I was referring to.

Here I am writing about the way things used to be. What’s coming up in the world coins collecting field? I don’t know, I’m old.

Out there in social media are people all over the world trading coins back and forth. There seems to be lively interest in coins of such low value that no dealer wants to deal with them. They trade with each other by taping a couple of coins into a letter and save on what seems to have become profit-crushing shipping costs in most countries.

Those young collectors are internet natives. They get their information from anywhere on the web. Most of them are in countries other than the one I’m writing in, the USA. Most of them are at least bilingual. They don’t have any money, but they still want to collect coins.

 - Bob Reis