I am attending the Memphis paper money show. To come here is like visiting an old friend, many old friends in fact.

It is a tradition. Ribs on Thursday night. Steak on Friday. But that is only if you aren’t bidding in the auction, which is being called by Smythe this year. Bank Note Reporter staff tends to eat early and come back to watch the sale action.

One of my missions this trip is to take a photograph of Mart Delger and his wife. To my knowledge, I have never met his wife. She is attending the show for the first time ever.

Mart has been exhibit chairman at Memphis since the show was founded in 1977. He has done wonders in attracting quality exhibits in large numbers. It is a wonder to see what he achieves year after year.

This year there is a seven-case display of Serial Number 1 large-size notes by Jess Lipka. Amazing. I wouldn’t want to pay the insurance bill.

However, amazing notes aside, my mission is to get that photograph of Mrs. Delger. I have to say thank you for the hand-typed lists of exhibitors that she has given Mart to give me. I have to let her know how highly we think of Mart and how appreciative we are that he has been such a key volunteer all these years.

It is not an easy job. There are always last minute changes. In fact, there are enough of those to drive even Mart a little crazy. I hope he can still take it. I don’t know what the Memphis show would do without him.

You might know what the wages of sin are, but how about the wages of blogging?

I have been introduced to the power of my blog by a surprise package yesterday. Just before lunch I received a phone call from the mailroom. There was a big box there waiting for me that had been delivered by FedEx.

How big was it, I asked. Pretty big was the reply. I said I would be there right away.

Usually I receive catalogs and they are about as big as it gets. Not this time. Oh, no. The box with my name on it was the biggest box I think I have ever received. It was even bigger than the Christmas sampler box Grover Criswell sent to my first boss back in 1978. It was more like a foot locker if not bigger.

I had to find a cart to haul it to my desk. I got it there and then I went to lunch.

I started to open it as my afternoon got under way and I showed editorial staffer Maggie Pahl the first thing in it. It was a heavy, leatherlike album that looked like it could have been an old family Bible.It was a paper money album.

I summoned Sue Konkel and Robbie Cain from the ad department and it was like opening presents. Rich-looking albums and fancy simulated wooden chests caused the four of us to ooh and aah.

Wow.

The box was sent by a company whose chief operating officer had read one of my blogs about marketing Presidential dollars. He liked it. He wanted to show me how his firm did it. He invited me to call. I will. He has gotten my attention.

How about yours?

It took 10 minutes for my computer to sign me in this morning. As I looked at the spinning wheel of death, as we call here in the office, one thought kept going through my mind:

“What am I doing here?”

Not even my computer seems to want me to work.

My brother and his wife are in from Charlotte, N.C. A nephew is out camping with his two sons for a Cub Scouts event and the family discussions over the weekend centered around the plans for the annual Fourth of July parade in Bonduel at the home of a niece of mine.

Because of that very same holiday, the production period for this week’s Numismatic News has been shortened by a day, so mentally for me this already is Tuesday.

I will be checking on who still hasn’t received their ballots for the American Numismatic Association election, though that problem seems to be in the process of getting resolved.

There will be the check of e-mail to see if there are any new complaints about what the U.S. Mint may or may not be doing right.

And while July may seem like a perfect time to kick back and enjoy the holiday, the hobby’s own schedule seems to be going into overdrive.

The Whitman Baltimore Coin and Collectibles Convention has just concluded.

I head for the airport Thursday morning to attend the annual Memphis paper money show, which is later now that it has been displaced from its traditional Father’s Day weekend.

After Memphis comes the new Summer FUN in West Palm Beach. A staff member will be going, but I will be here at home cooking hamburgers for the annual Old Car Show right here in Iola, Wis.

I get the funny feeling that there aren’t too many people out there to read this. They have more sense and a better schedule than I have and are having a relaxing week somewhere.

No? Well, do let me know. After all, misery loves company.

News stories don’t always end with directions on how to order something. That may seem like a a statement of the obvious. Perhaps not. In our daily lives infomercials tell us that we need to be healthy and fit, and by golly, they just happen to have a new drug or device that will help us reach those happy conditions.

When I write a story about a new coin from the U.S. Mint, I often, but not always, provide the Mint’s contact information. When a club issues a wooden nickel, I will tell readers the price and the order directions. An auction preview story will have contact information for the firm so readers can participate if they choose.

However, there are some stories where  the object is not to sell something, but simply to inform.

I had a couple of phone calls this week from individuals who had read a story in the June 26 Numismatic News about 10 category winners in the Coin of the Year competition. These honors are conferred by World Coin News, a sister publication to Numismatic News, after voting by an international panel of hobby judges.

The coins under review are dated 2005.

The two phone callers wanted to know who they should call to buy the coins that won in the 10 categories.

For the first caller I helpfully suggested that he go online and see who might be offering them. He did not have Internet, so that was out. I told him he could contact coin dealers and see if they had them in stock. Who, he wondered? I invited him to contact advertisers, but that I did not know who might have all of them. The caller sounded disappointed, but that concluded the call.

The second caller was a little more insistent. I offered the same suggestions, but he was not satisfied.

“How do you know about these coins if you can’t tell me where I can buy them? he demanded.

I replied that world mints told me about them.

What? He didn’t understand my use of “world mints,” so I had to explain that the countries that won the honors for the most part have their own mints, which strike coins and collectors buy them at the time of issue. Because the time of issue for 2005 coins is long past, that was not an option.

“Your front page says you are ‘the complete information source for coin collectors.’ Why don’t you know where I can get these?”

He had me there. Why don’t I know where these coins are currently being offered?
Perhaps our advertisers are missing an opportunity.

The three U.S. coins are fairly easy. Our major advertisers carry them. The coin issues of Belarus, Israel, Germany, Australia and Austria are more difficult. They go off into the world dealer community and appear in their online ads, mail price lists and other avenues. The nature of the world field is more dispersed than the U.S. field. Without an online capability, you just might not find what you are looking for without taking some days or weeks to do some tracking.

In the old days, tracking coins was the fun part. In the 21st century, will it remain so?

Gold dropped $9 yesterday and silver fell also.. It got me thinking about the Class of ’63 column from the Jan. 30 issue of Numismatic News. I made 10 predictions for 2007.

These predictions were delivered Jan. 6 to a meeting of the Sarasota Coin Club held in conjunction with the Florida United Numismatists Convention in Orlando.

I am feeling pretty good about the list so far. I nailed the sellout for the First Spouse coins, but I hedged the big one, the possibility that the coin market has topped out and the boom is over. I stated it as a question.

My sense of gold and silver weakness I am also still comfortable with. I don’t like forecasting weakness in precious metals because I know what weakness does to the coin business, but it is what it is. I won’t get a medal for it even if I am absolutely right down to the last decimal point.

Weakness in current gold Buffalo proof coin sales is also what I predicted back in January. Will it finish out at a level I forecast? We have a long way to go yet.

At the end of this blog I will put the full text of my Jan. 30 column so you can see for yourself.

Nothing is absolutely out of the question yet. That’s not bad for six months into the forecast period. What do you think?

What follows is the column text:


I had the privilege of speaking to the Sarasota Coin Club Jan. 6 during the Florida United Numismatists convention in Orlando. This is my second year in a row. That means either they liked what they heard last year enough to invite me back, or I’m just a soft touch.

Perhaps it is my friend, Bart Bartanowicz. He is a member. He made the arrangements. He asked that I offer 10 predictions for the year 2007. I said OK.

Sarasota is a great club. More than 100 members came up to Orlando on a bus that FUN paid for, one of two clubs for which this was done. I appreciated a large audience and their attention and participation.

I hope you find what I told them to be interesting.

My first forecast I put in the form of a question. I said when you have grey hair, you have memories. One of mine is the peak of the market in 1980. I asked whether we would see the end of the current run-up this year. To illustrate, I said the 1913 nickel did not sell in the Jan. 2 auction. While nobody rings a bell when the market peaks, we tend to look backwards and find something to pin it on. In 1980 it was the January peak of gold and silver prices. At the time, we did not recognize it as the end of the boom. However, by the time the Central States convention rolled around in April in Lincoln, Neb., it was obvious the game was up for a while. Poor Lincoln got the reputation as the place the market died and Central States has never been back.

For prediction No. 2, I said that the consolidation of the industry will continue and may even accelerate. This is a phenomenon of prosperity, where the big firms gobble up the smaller ones. It is also an action of a firm that is in trouble. David Hall at his lunch Jan. 5 warned the attendees not to borrow money to hold inventories/collections. If a warning is needed, do we have a problem?

I picked my Jan. 2 column bullion forecasts for No. 3. I said gold would end the year at $600. This looked a little bit daring when I wrote it in December, but a $35 drop in gold at the start of 2007 made it seem almost like yesterday’s news.

Prediction 4 was my silver forecast of $12 by the end of the year.

Forecast No. 5 is a plunge in the number of proof Buffalo gold one-ounce coins in 2007 as compared to 2006. I said sales will run at about one-quarter the rate of sales in 2006 because of the first-year-of-issue demand disappearing. This puts the sales total at 60,000 pieces. If I take the maximum number for 2006 of 300,000, a quarter of that is 75,000 pieces.

Forecast No. 6 is a market feeding frenzy for the First Spouse half-ounce gold coins in May. Their limited mintage to be set by the Treasury will attract the low-mintage, new-issue crowd.

No. 7 is that average collectors are going to have a great year. With book and Internet initiatives set by my company and others in the field, there has never been a better time to be an average collector. There is more information and shared knowledge out there than ever before.

Forecast No. 8 is the likelihood of more lawsuits. Legal actions follow profits. The coin business has been good in recent years and there will be attempts by some to use the legal process to share in the bounty.

My predictions 9 and 10 are tied together. I said this year will see the adoption of new compositions for the U.S. cent and the nickel. I further went out on a limb and said there is a strong likelihood that the new compositions will have steel centers, using a Canadian bonding process. Perhaps the U.S. Mint will not like its suppliers to use licensed technology, but worse, the Mint and its congressional overseers do not like spending more than face value to produce the denominations. Both denominations will continue to be made.

What do you think? Am I off the wall? Am I too cautious? Only time will tell, but I was pleased by the reception given me by the members of the Sarasota club. They are a great group.

I have written many times how important the profit motive is to coin collectors. It may not be the basic reason that a collector collects, but no collectors I know are averse to making a little money.

I should write PROFIT in capital letters when referring to First Spouse coins.

First Spouse gold coin sellers on eBay seem to be attempting to get about double issue price for the Martha Washington and Abigail Adams proof and uncirculated pieces that went on sale June 19 and sold out the same day.

I see “Buy it now” prices of $2,999.95 and $3,200 when the initial cost for a proof and an uncirculated was $1,681.80.

The U.S. Mint is concerned about the perception collectors who were shut out of the sales process might have about what happened. I speculated in my blog last week that a theoretical 4,000 buyers could clean out the entire 40,000 pieces of each design.

In the event, the Mint tells me that there were 25,000 orders received between the two designs and the average sale was roughly three coins per household.

It was conceded that about 8 percent of the orders received were trying to get around the 5-coin per household limit for proofs and for uncirculateds, meaning 10 coins per household total for each design. These will not be honored.

I was told that demand far exceeded the Mint’s most optimistic forecasts and that those forecasts were based on market research.

A consequence of the initial sellout is the Mint says it raises the possibility of an increase in the number of coins offered for the four designs to be sold in 2008. The Mint is ever adjusting sales numbers trying to walk the tightrope between sellouts and having an excess supply at the end of a program. It doesn’t want to melt coins it has already struck.

While profit is important, I have not heard much from collectors who were pursuing the “shocking” idea of actually buying the new coins to hold in their collections. I know they are out there somewhere. I hope I will hear from them.

Legislation has been introduced to give actor/comedian Jerry Lewis a congressional gold medal. I have been a little bit put off by the trend in recent years of Congress giving gold medals to a whole host of people that I had considered ineligible in light of the history of the medal, but perhaps I am too narrow minded.

The medal series started as national recognitions by the Continental Congress for the military leaders whose victories during the Revolutionary War won Americans their liberty from England. George Washington received the first one.

Nowadays the medals seem to be awarded to just about everybody under the sun. But perhaps the wider award of the congressional medals is an accurate reflection of the times in which we live and future generations will look back and consider these awards to be perfectly appropriate.

Ronald Reagan was at first derided as an actor trying to be President. His rejoinder was he did not see how any occupant of the Oval Office could be anything but an actor to do the job properly.

Now we have Law & Order’s Fred Thompson as a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

If congressional gold medals used to go to generals and Presidents, now that actors – and anybody else for that matter –  can be President, it is perhaps appropriate that Jerry Lewis be given the congressional gold medal.