It is time for me to start thinking about next year’s Numismatic Ambassador Awards. These are given to individuals who are the selfless volunteers who make the organized hobby function, from setting up bourse tables at a local VFW Hall show to overseeing regional and national hobby functions like club National Coin Week activities.

There is no set of strict criteria. Numismatic News founded the award in 1974 on the principle that it takes one to know one. We take nominations from anybody. We create hobby biographies from these nominations. We prepare a ballot that is then sent out to current holders of Ambassador Awards for them to vote on the next annual class of winners. The top vote getters are the winners.

This process works wonderfully well, because it is both self generating and self policing by the grass roots of the hobby.

It has been my privilege to give Ambassador Awards to hobbyists of widely varying backgrounds. I look forward to giving many more.

So start thinking of who you want to nominate for an award. The formal call in the print edition of Numismatic News will be in the Nov. 20 issue. There is a nominating form that will help you along in your thought process. I will have the form posted on www.numismaticnews.net when the formal call for nominations is ready in a few days.

Put your thinking caps on and get a name or two in mind. Without grass-roots input there would be no award winners and, even if there were, the awards so given would have much less meaning.

Does the U.S. Mint want to give up some or all of its duties to strike circulating coinage for all Americans?

Private firms already provide blanks to the U.S. Mint. Has the time come for the venerable institution to farm out the actual striking process as well?

Perhaps so.

There is some murmuring going on behind the scenes on Capitol Hill that the legislation being considered that would empower the Treasury Secretary to set the compositions and weights of the circulating coins is somehow being drawn up so that it is setting up a private firm to get a contract to strike coins.

How would collectors and others feel about this should the scuttlebutt prove to have some grain of truth in it?

As you might expect, I am paying close attention. More will be coming one way or another as Numismatic News explores this further.

Are people who saved state quarters when the program began beginning to spend them? I am moved to ask that question because of a state quarter I received in my change on Friday.

The coin is a beautiful BU Pennsylvania quarter. That used to be one of the designs that traded for a premium price on the roll market, so I am not used to seeing too many of them in my change, though I have from time to time run across an example that definitely showed wear from some circulation.

Just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer, one Pennsylvania quarter doesn’t mean collectors or hoarders or souvenir hunters have decided as a group to give up.

But this is a good time to speculate. We are concluding the ninth year of the state quarter program. The Utah quarter will be released Nov. 5. There is just one year and five designs to go after that.

Nine years is a long time in human affairs. Age, changing interests and perhaps life events like stress over a mortgage payment can put coins that had once been prized possessions into circulation.

Because of their massive mintages of many times the annual production numbers that prevailed before the start of the quarter program, migration of state quarters from the hands of savers to spenders could have a major effect on the number of quarters the Mint needs to strike in future years.

It is too early to declare it a fact, so I will keep watching, but the post-Civil War period is on my mind. Mintages in the 1880s declined sharply because huge numbers of coins that had been hoarded and sent to Canada during the Civil War found their way back to daily use after the United States successfully extinguished the inflation and by 1879 had once again made all forms of U.S. currency equivalent in value. There were no longer premiums for gold coins or silver coins or gold-backed paper money. It became one big interchangeable mass.

There are enough state quarters out there to have a similar national impact. The question is will they? What are you seeing in your change? E-mail me at david.harper@fwpubs.com.

Retail stores aren’t the only places where it is already Christmas. Here we are preparing our holiday gift guide that will be inserted in futures issues of Numismatic News, World Coin News and Bank Note Reporter.

The difference is what we are doing here in the office is known to just a few of us while the retail business is known to virtually everyone. We are simply planning ahead for issues that carry the December cover dates.

Now that I have you thinking about the holidays, do you dare give a hobby-related gift? It is a challenge. Even when it involves one collector giving something to a collecting child or grandchild, there can be false steps. Noncollectors may think we collectors are all the same, but we know better.

That means finding something that can have the widest possible appeal. Let me suggest books. We all know that many collectors are reluctant to spend money on books when it seems it could be better used buying coins. Take that seductive thought out of the equation. Give a book. The recipient will be grateful and he or she will never have had to go through the agony of thinking the book somehow took the place of a more desirable coin.

Yes, this is a backdoor way of achieving a goal that shouldn’t have to be undertaken indirectly. But books are like vegetables. Those who consume them are better off for it.

Never has knowledge been more important. The Internet offers so many collectors more numerous opportunities to make mistakes. Books can help shorten the learning curve.

You may know that the 1804 dollar offered online can’t possibly be real, but the less educated with the question of how you can know can be answered pre-emptively without that potential for making the questioner feel silly or awkward.

Knowledge is power. Consider sharing yours with someone by giving them a book.

Halloween won’t occur until next Wednesday, according to my wall calendar, but for the financial markets, the time for seeing scary figures seems to have been Friday. Moreover, the holiday may have an extended run on Wall Street. We will find that out today.

Friday was the 20th anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash. In one day, the market fell more than 20 percent. The significance of that day wasn’t what happened, but what didn’t happen. The U.S. and the world did not plunge into depression. It took a couple more years, a saving and loan crisis and a war in Kuwait to put the economy into reverse.

The coin market also didn’t take notice of the Wall Street mayhem. The boom in slabbed silver dollars was in full force. Grading services were in their infancy then and the volume of coins going to PCGS and NGC was so huge that anybody who could grade that went to work for the services made a bundle, too.

Like the larger economy, it took another couple of years for the silver dollar boom to play itself out.

What about gold? It hardly budged. On Oct. 19, 1987, it was $481.70 a troy ounce. On Dec. 31, it was $486.20. For silver, the crash was a decided negative. It went from $8.19 an ounce to $6.68.

When the crash came in 1987, I had already written an editorial about the effect of rising base metals prices on U.S. coinage. After the crash, it was a worthless topic because the base metals reversed course as silver did. I had to do a rewrite that completely reversed its meaning.

I don’t know what the markets will do today, but I will be keenly watching silver and the base metals.