You buy a roll of Lincoln pennies off eBay — they’re all the right date and mint-mark for your target coin, so you send for it and open the package, expecting 50 totally different coins; but then when you open the roll, you have exactly 50 copies of the exact same coin. This is great if the coins all turn out to be that special error-coin you were hoping to find at least one of, but with experience, you’ll know that if you buy a mint box of coins that are all the same date and mint-mark, the chances are excellent that you’ll have thousands of exactly similar coins on your hands at the end of a search, so you might as well just search one, and take the other 49,999 searches as written, eh?
Okay, so you set a goal, to find a DDO or DDR in a 1983 Lincoln Memorial.
Now you want to search, preferably only 1983 pennies, so you can focus on your objectives more clearly. If you’re constantly searching a variety of coins and/or issues, you’ll have a harder time of grading and identifying.
When you have 50-100 of the exact same coin before you, there’s a chance you’ll see something interesting — the repetition gives you time and energy to focus and penetrate the vision.
Okay, so the problem now presents itself; what’s the point of searching hundreds or thousands of 1983 pennies, if they’re all exactly the same?
And that’s my point; there is no point.
So here’s my solution: what I do is to accumulate a collection of each target date. When I have “enough” of them — which varies according to several Objective Values, such as whether I’ve recently eaten, what color sox I’m wearing, or the passing of a VW in front of the house.
So if you were watching the ICW over the weekend, you heard me offer to ship out some of these search rolls. Before you hurry to the phone or email me to order them, let me explain:
First of all, they’re hand-collected by me personally, but they are NOT searched, by which I mean subjected to scrutiny under a 10x loupe. This means that any Doubled Dies would be totally missed by me and most of the folks I know with a few younger exceptions.
Fact is, I don’t give a damn about the values of the coins. I have no need to parade my triumphs and conquests through the streets of Rome. Actually, what I had in mind is showing you two things: one, high-grade coins are very much out there to be found, and secondly, that you can do it and have a heck of a lot of fun doing it.
And if that isn’t enough to whet the whistle for this brand of being-food, let me add that you can actually earn a livelihood from this spiritual practice, and you can do it even if you have no mobility or are totally unhireable due to age, over-experience or other hiring issues.
I’m offering skill-building coinology workshops, and I’ll be issuing DVDs if you can’t make the journey to here. You can start your very own family business with only $25 worth of rented pennies, and if you don’t like the pennies you get, return them to the bank!!!
Fun? You bet it is, and you never know how an evening is going to turn out. Let’s take the discovery of a bright, uncirculated 1993-D. This coin is known to have occasional bursts of wrongness, mostly in the form of a rotated die, actually either 90 degrees (about $150 value) or 180 degrees (about $250 value), and it can even sport a dime reverse ($150,000 value).
If you’re a practiced coinologist, you’ll have no trouble spotting this powerful and lucrative error, but the thing is, as you slowly turn the coin over, you get the feeling that it’s a poker card you’re turning over face-up to see the payoff. There are other “face-turn” card-style dates that yield high profits if you manage to hit them.
When you get search rolls, you get my objective coin-sort, no search, just sort. I pass all coins of a given date and mint-mark to their boxes, without comment or interference; I surely would not want to get in between you and your coin-karma.
You get the result of hours of work, slugging through thousands and thousands of befouled coinage, finding the best in the bunch. You get about fifty coins in each search roll; I don’t fuss with them. You get the next fifty coins in that slot, all coming from a variety of sources, different boxes, different banks, all from a wide variety of local and distant sources. This offers a much better chance of hitting your target error coins than having all the coins come from a single source, as you’d get with a roll off eBay.
I can sometimes see “something” about a coin here and there, but I have no interest in finding out what it might be; I leave that to you. The coins are YOURS — I merely sort them and make sure than they’re in reasonably good shape…unless the payoff is high regardless of condition, in which case, you’ll see some brownies in there as well as the better stuff.
Although I have no personal interest in the outcome of each search roll, I am very interested to know how you made out with them, and in particular, how they helped your searches to get sharper with better yields.
Using my receptacle bins, you can’t miss. At the moment, they run somewhere around 24 of them for Lincoln Memorials, Bicentennials & Shields. Wheaties would be a special thing on a much higher order with far more complexity, if you’re targeting errors mostly, which is what I would do.
I haven’t yet determined the availability of the papier-mache boxes, but I’ll post info as soon as I have it. I’ll be talking to Michael at Franklin’s and she’ll put in the order after Christmas, I expect.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby