Stages of Coinlightenment

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I hear you asking, “What are the stages of Coinlightenment?”, but shouldn’t you first be asking, “What the hell is Coinlightenment, anyway???”, or “How the hell do I use Coinlightenment?”, or “Why should I bother to mess with Coinlightenment???”.

I’ll answer your third question first. There’s money in them-thar hills, is why.

Coin Knowledge means cash in the pocket and a feather in the cap. You’ve found something, discovered something, uncovered a treasure in a penny.

Let’s take a look at your “Pilgrim’s Progress” toward Coinlightenment:

  • IT’S JUST A PENNY — This is the first dawning of an awakening consciousness. There is a realization that a penny is present, and that it is a penny, although at this stage, it’s JUST a penny, meaning that it is insignificant and generally unworthy of special notice.
  • IT’S A LINCOLN PENNY — In the Second Stage of Coinlightenment, one becomes dimly aware that there is an entire run or set or collection or something, related to pennies that look similar to this one.
  • IT’S A LINCOLN CENT — Now in the Third Stage, the consciousness is becoming aware of the fact that this is a particular issue of a particular type of currency.
  • IT’S A CIRCULATED LINCOLN CENT — In the Fourth Stage of Coinlightenment, the awareness of many different possible states and applications of a U.S. coin becomes somewhat present, along with a general concept of how U.S. copper coins are manufactured.
  • IT’S A CIRCULATED LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — In this Fifth Stage of Coinlightenment, one becomes aware of the special set of Lincoln cents that were made from 1909 until 1958, when the reverse design was changed from the double wheats to the memorial building. It is presently a shield, but this is soon to change once again.
  • IT’S A TEEN DECADE LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — Now the dawning of true Coinsciousness is breaking upon your shining intellect — you are acutely aware that Lincoln cents can be sorted into decades, and that each decade has its own unique characteristics and expectations, such as distribution patterns, with the first year, fifth year, sixth year, seventh year, eighth year and ninth year being dominant in numbers, with the second, third and sometimes fourth year being on the scarce or downright rare side.
  • IT’S A 1912 LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — At last, you’ve taken the time and spent the energy to look more closely at the coin, now taking note of the date, but is there more?
  • IT’S A 1912-S LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — Aha! Now you see that it is not merely a common Lincoln cent, but a mint-marked coin, notably from the San Francisco Mint, noted for their continual screwups, resulting in many wondrous error coins, so many of them that you might wonder how they got past the guards at the gates, and most of them didn’t.
  • IT’S A HIGH-GRADE 1912-S LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — Okay, you can SEE that there’s grade here, but how much grade, exactly?
  • IT’S AN MS-65 RD 1912-S LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT — Congratulations, you’re almost home! Keep struggling! Peer more keenly! Penetrate the Mystery!
  • IT’S AN MS-66 RD 1912-S LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT WORTH ABOUT $13,000! — Now you’re just one step from the Ultimate Realization:
  • WOW! IT’S AN MS-66 RD 1912-S LINCOLN WHEAT-BACK CENT, POP 1, I’M KEEPING THIS!!! — You have finally gone completely over the top. You’re fully initiated and ready to handle the Bardos like a pro, and you are now doomed to be a hopeless Lincoln Set collector with no hope of recovery!

That’s right. From here, there is no return.

Continue reading →

Teaching Someone How To See

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Gallery window from the interior of the Mall.

There’s a world of treasure, real treasure, the kind you can take to the bank, and yet, it’s as-if invisible to most people, who look right past the treasures of life, in a bleak vision of the present.

It’s not that hard to transform the vision from “bleak” to “clear”, but it takes a bit of bait and the dangling of a hook to catch the fish, as it were.

What’s needed is a goal, and a goal doesn’t come about without a payoff.

The payoff?

Simple — Money.

Of course, that’s only the apparent payoff. The real payoff is an immediate improvement in vision, clarity and presence-of-attention, which is the kind of powerful presence that can be invoked through the use of special attentions, such as the ones employed in a coin search. Continue reading →

Coin Search Step-By-Step

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Here’s a rundown of what specific actions I take with a new bag or box or roll of wheaties to be searched. It’s basic, and of course doesn’t contain “The Moves”, which are derived from Magic in the Mirror — MiM — in order to handle the coins efficiently and effectively. I’ll assume that the coins are already separated out into decades. If not, they’ll have to be separated out before beginning a search, because you can only compare coins with other coins of the same decade, when grading, or you’ll get entirely baffled by the sudden changes in quality, so the general rule is ALWAYS SEARCH BY DECADE.

So, you’ve got a bag of TEENS, TWENTIES, THIRTIES, FORTIES or FIFTIES coins. Let’s begin a search on them. Put the bag nearby on the floor or on a very strong table.

  • FIRST ACTION — Open the bag.
  • SECOND ACTION — Reach into the bag and scoop out a handful of coins.
  • THIRD ACTION — Place the handful of coins on your right on the velvet search pad.
  • FOURTH ACTION — Put on your Opti-Visors. I use #7, fairly strong ones, these days.
  • FIFTH ACTION — Arrange the pile of coins on your right into piles of about 10 coins each.
  • SIXTH ACTION — Take the first pile of ten coins and FAN or SPREAD them out in front of you where the light hits them perfectly, so you can see every detail.
  • SEVENTH ACTION — FLIP or TURN OVER the coins so they all face downward, wheats up.
  • EIGHTH ACTION — FLIP your Opti-Visor down so you can see the coin’s surface through them clearly and easily, and CHECK THE COINS for any sign of “quality”, meaning that there are some lines still in the wheat ears. You want to take out anything that isn’t TOTALLY FLAT — absolutely every sign of value or quality.
  • NINTH ACTION — Place any GRADABLE coin FACE DOWN, WHEATS UP, on the velvlet pad, to your LEFT, in a separate pile.
  • TENTH ACTION — FLIP the remaining coins in the spread FACE UP, to reveal the date and mint mark, if there is a mint-mark. Remember that coins produced at the Philadelphia Mint never carry a “p” mint mark, although in other denominations there are exceptions to this rule, notably the wartime nickel.
  • ELEVENTH ACTION — PLACE the coins in the correct piles, starting with the lowest date on the left. All mint-mark coins should be stacked FACE UP in the far center, slightly to the right, building stacks of about 15 coins.
  • TWELFTH ACTION — Scoop up the stacks of coins into tubes and label each tube as you fill and cap it.

Now all that remains is to store the tubes in boxes until they are needed. I’ll now do a step-by-step rundown on how to handle the coins from search to sale: Continue reading →

Gorby’s Best Grading Skill-Builder

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If you ask me, what’s my best grading skill-builder, I’d have no hesitation in saying that it’s my 1940-1958 “s” mint-mark pennies, that range all the way from G4 to AU-57 and sometimes MS-60 BN, which is common enough to make mention of it.

The BEST GRADING SKILL BUILDER comes in packs of 100 coins at $25 per package, just a hair below my actual cost of acquisition of those coins.

Sure, I lose in the short run, but I assure you that I DO make it up in volume, and it’s not about net profit, it’s all about cash-flow, as any accountant will tell you.

If you’re planning on using these coins to help others gain these skills, you don’t sort or pre-sort these coins, except to build your own skills — they should be poured out onto the table for the trainee just as they came to you in the plastic ziplock baggie. Continue reading →

How To Turn a Penny Into Dollars

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Okay, you have a bag of “wheaties”, which means a bag of Lincoln Wheat-Ear Back One Cent pieces from one of three U.S. mints — Philadelphia, Denver and San Francisco.

Of the three, you could always count on the mint in San Francisco to develop lots of mint errors, notably involving the mint-mark.

In the Philadelphia coins, there are no mint-marks, but on the other hand, there are lots of opportunities to strike it rich with DDOs, which is to say, “Doubled-Die Obverse” errors, which means that the die got struck twice during the creation of the die from the HUB — it’s all very complicated, but you can find out about the process by reading the Mega Red coin book, which I think you’ll find surprisingly good reading, if you’re at all interested in the history of the coins and the mints that made them AND the horses they rode in on!

You’re dealing here with circulation coins, not special coins issued by the mint to make money for the politicians, such as the “proof sets” and “eagles” and special issue “collectible” gold coins, and other equally miserable excuses for collectibles.

If you mark something as “collectible” and everybody collects them and keeps them totally intact and pristine and mint-condition, guess what? They’re not collectible at all, because scarcity is a powerful driver in the collectibles market, and that’s just not there when everybody has one. Continue reading →

Salt the Mine

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Okay, here’s my entry into the coinology marketing field:

GORBY’S PENNY PROSPECTOR

It’s a packet, pouch, box or clear bag with a bunch of ordinary wheaties pennies — a carefully calculated mix of teens, twenties and thirties Lincoln Wheat cents.

Please note that I have avoided the nicer-looking but generally worthless later Lincoln cents, the forties and fifties. You can buy them by the shovelful in mint condition for very little, so why muck about looking for and through them for the coins you really want?

My thought is that the price would be slightly different for a bag of 1910’s, 1920’s and 1930’s pennies, but like a crackerjack box, each bag is GUARANTEED to contain at least one, and sometimes two or three, PREMIUM COINS. Continue reading →

Worthless Coins For Sale!!!

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This $2,200 1925-s was hiding in a pile of junk coins, looking worthless as hell, until I spotted it — it’s brown and blends in with the junk perfectly well.

“On the street, Hale could feel really successful. The bitter wind slashed at him; he had only seventy-six cents in his pocket and no place to sleep. At last, he was getting somewhere!”

That’s a quote from my Dad Horace’s fantasy novel, “None But Lucifer”, and it’s relevant to the practice I intend to introduce, the practice of Coinology, which starts out by learning to actually SEE what you’re looking at, which is the very essence of the Waking State and is the gate to higher consciousness and essence love.

When you send for Gorby’s Penny Prospecting Kit #1 at only $49.95, you will receive nothing but the very worst, I promise!

I personally guarantee that every single coin you receive in your Gorby’s Wheaties Loot Bag will be worthless, or as near worthless as I can arrange.

I personally search and destroy all value coins out of the pack, to be sold for exorbitant amounts to passers-by.

Why?

Because you’re learning to see VALUE and GRADE, and it’s invisible against similar grade, so it needs a contrasting background, hence the bag of crap coins intended to throw you off and confuse things as completely as possible.

Dichotomy.

Good versus evil, red versus blue, warm versus cold. It’s contrast that helps you see a thing, like spotting a dark meteorite on a field of snow or desert sand. It’s easy to see against a starkly contrasting background, but imagine finding that same meteorite in a jungle or amongst similar-looking rocks.

You wouldn’t stand a chance.

So, I gotta give you something to SEE the high value high grade coins against, and that’d be junk coins, all no better than GOOD to VERY GOOD, and that’s what I’ve spent hours and hours doing — scouring out all the quality down to crap.

Want perfect coins? Want to hit the JACKPOT COIN of all time? Want to be the hero on your block with a self-found MS-66 RD 1909-s VDB ready for third-party grading?

Well, don’t give it another thought. That’s not going to happen, at least not by searching junk coins. The real money is in the junk. What is someone else’s throwaway is your treasure, if you know how to SEE.

So forget about hitting The Big One, and concentrate on transmission of the Teaching.

Okay, so you’re not going to hit the Big One, the 1909-s VDB or 1922 No D, so what IS going to happen???

What IS going to happen is that you are going to train yourself to properly, efficiently and effectively search 1909-1939 Wheaties for value above what you paid.

You’ll be paying exactly what I pay — anywhere from 5 cents a coin for the 1930s coins to a dime for the 1920s coins and 20 cents a pop for the 1930s coins, for the bag of 100% LIFETIME GUARANTEED bag of junk coins, all G-4-6, not a bit higher, and certainly no lower.

Now, hidden deeply within the bag of junk “BASE” coins will be several “TARGET” COINS which you’ll try to pick out from the bagful of crap coins, which will cost you an average of a dime per junk coin. Continue reading →

Gorby’s Penny-Picker Cash Cow

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What is a “Gorby’s Penny-Picker Cash Cow”, and why would I want one?

Okay, fair question, and here’s the best answer I can give you at the moment — a Penny Picker Cash Cow is a fair booth. Of course, it can be applied anywhere, in a store, apartment or traveling bus.

First of all, don’t bother to register the concept — it’s not new, but it might be new to you, which is, technically, new.

So, of what precisely does a Penny Picker Cash Cow consist?

First of all, shouldn’t you be asking whether this Cash Cow is a Work Thing or a Business Thing?

Well, it’s both. You earn a livelihood from your Bodhisattva work, and it takes several very specific forms — obtaining coins, sorting coins, searching coins, grading coins, packaging coins, selling coins and teaching coin search to others.

When you send in your $450, I buy a bag of wheaties and search them to cherry-pick anything EF and above, and put those in a different container. The lesser quality coins are placed in your “Search Bag” or “Go Fish Bowl” in your fair booth or shop or waiting room. Continue reading →

Turn Your Shop into a Place of Initiation

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1941 BU Walking Liberty Half Dollar Magic Coin in capsule, $225.

Most silver half dollars run from about $35 for something decent all the way down to crap coins at $8 bucks apiece, if you don’t mind the fact that the coin is unrecognizable and basically worth the silver scrap price and not a lot more.

Even cheaper is the half dollar you get from your local grocer or bank clerk. You’ll need a half dollar in order to learn the very first trick a performing magician learns, which is called “The French Drop”.

The French Drop is the Very First Trick You’ll Ever Learn, if you learn from a pro, and learning The French Drop requires a specific and very serious and very official Initiation into the Order of Performing Magicians.

I’ll give specifics in a moment, but first, let’s examine the concept of coin magic itself:

One of the most natural and easiest tricks for which to find a prop is a coin trick. Almost everyone has a coin of some kind or another. The most common coin for the French Drop is the U.S. Half Dollar, but there are plenty of other coins and plenty of good reasons to use an unusual coin. Continue reading →

Holiday Shopping Ideas

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We all want to find that perfect Xmas present — the one that packs small but plays big, that looks like a million and costs like a candy bar. Well, bunkie, you’ve come to the right Huckster Booth!

So let’s build a Holiday Gifting List a little differently this year. I’ll post a few of my personal favorites from my collections on zazzle. Lemme show ya a couple of cheapie stocking-stuffers that will blow your mind:

Continue reading →