When the U.S. Mint suspended sales of the “W” uncirculated American Eagle gold coins, it gave itself until Sept. 27 to reprice them and begin selling them again.

With prices moving as fast as they have been since the Sept. 13 sales suspension, it will be interesting to see how the Mint thinks in this regard.

I assume it won’t take my recommendation to let the prices fluctuate daily. A fixed price seems likely. How aggressively ahead will the Mint set the price?

Will it be $50 above market for the one-ounce coin or more or less?

If you want to know the Mint’s expectations for prices, this is the number to look at.

Its dilemma is that too high a price will curb sales. Too low a price will ensure that the sales suspension-repricing mechanism will have to be used again before next year’s coins become available.

With gold bullion knocking on a door not opened to it since January 1980 in terms of prices, smart collectors should be thinking about the opportunities that might open up in the gold coin market.

This has nothing to do with gold speculation and everything to do with being a true collector.

If we learned any lesson at all in 1980 it is that mintage figures and condition meant less and less as gold hit higher and higher highs. For a time, everything but the true jewels of the various gold series saw their values simply boiled down to a formula of actual gold weight times the day’s price of gold. It seemed like cultural vandalism. The only decision collectors had was “are you selling, or not?” There were plenty of people in line to dump whatever they could at the record prices.

In such a market, distortions develop. A coin that is relatively scarce that can be bought for metallic value might just be a good deal long term. When gold prices stabilize, relative scarcities reassert themselves.

One of those relative scarcities to consider is in the new First Spouse series. Mintages have been 20,000 apiece, proof versus uncirculated in the sellouts. That is historically unusual. Collectors prefer proofs over time by a factor of 3:1 or 4:1. The numbers would seem to indicate that the proofs might just be undervalued relative to the uncirculated pieces.

Of course, all bets are off it gold goes to $100 an ounce, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Every collector should keep at least one eye on long-term values and scarcity relationships when considering the purchase of coins with high bullion values. It could pay off in the long run.

Most collectors experience a “eureka” moment. Before it occurs, they are like the rest of the population. After it occurs,  they grab the coin price guides and are on the prowl.

This subject matter occurred to me in a roundabout way. I broke my favorite coffee cup yesterday morning. My days usually begin at 5 a.m. and not long after that I am consuming my first morning cup of coffee in my favorite coffee cup.

There is no real reason to become attached to inanimate objects, but somehow or other, these crazy attachments form. It is probably a matter of routine. At that hour of the morning, I don’t want to have to think about what I am doing. “Grab cup, pour coffee” is the height of my intellectual capacity in those first few minutes of a new day. I could grab any number of cups or mugs, but I don’t.

Now I have no choice.

I have a coin to which I have formed a similar attachment. It provided me with my eureka moment and is probably why I am a coin collector. It is a 1909 Lincoln cent. I have owned it for 44 years. It has almost no value, but it is priceless to me because of what followed.

I found it when I was eight years old going through all the coins in the house. I had seen an ad in a comic book. In it was the promise that some cents dated before 1940 would be purchased for premium prices. I wanted that money.

I found a number of cents that met the threshold of having dates before 1940. The 1909 was the prize.

Something 54 years old in my hands seemed almost beyond comprehension at the time. I did not mail it in. Instead, my mother saw what I was doing and channeled it by taking me to a hobby shop. I got my first Whitman album. Actually, there were two. At the time, they ran 1909-1940 and 1941 to date. There were mintage figures in those albums that I could see which dates were the truly scarce ones. None that I had were.

My mother probably knew that would be the result. On the other hand, she did not realize at the time what a powerful force had been let loose in my life.

But I had formed my attachment to that 1909 Lincoln cent. I am still on the hobby prowl. Do they go hand in hand? They sure seem to.

What’s your story? Comment here or send me an e-mail at david.harper@fwpubs.com