What’s your problem? I might say that to some collectors who were acting like a bunch of old ladies, but that is an insult to old ladies. I apologize to every single one of them in advance.

However I ask the question because coin collectors seem to be morphing into Internet-fed gossip mongers who are up to no good.

The most recent target was the Mint’s policy of not requiring signatures when coins are delivered to collector homes.

These collectors complained so loudly that the Mint has now changed its delivery policy effective March 13 to require signatures for packages containing $300 or more in value or precious metal coinage.

Why?

The complaints sprang less from what actually happened in the way of losses suffered to the simple conjecture of what might happen.

What’s next? Demands that collector packages be blue, delivered only between the hours of 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. and that uniformed drivers wear the colors of the local powerhouse football team?

If a business like the Mint thinks the risk of theft is so low that it need not require signature, why should that matter to the collector recipients?

All they need do is accept the coins and enjoy them.

Apparently that isn’t good enough.

I feel like I’m watching an Old West movie scene where someone is waving a pistol at the bar.

“OK, Mint, start dancing.”

Sure enough, the Mint starts dancing.

Is this healthy in the long run?

Collectors often ask what they can do to attract future generations.

The first thing I can think of is to stop acting like creepy old men with too much time on our hands complaining that the world today is nothing like it used to be.

I also remember the complaint letters I used to receive from readers who missed deliveries when signatures were required and then had to drive somewhere to pick up a package that couldn’t be left behind.

Oh boy, I will start getting those complaints again.

The ninth in the 40 or so First Spouse half-ounce gold coins with a $10 face value will go on sale Thursday at noon at the U.S. Mint’s Web site.

This is the first coin of the third year in the series. Issued at a rate of four coins per year, counting this year, there are eight years or so to go.

Will the downtrend in sales continue? I would expect so. The question is simply by how many.

I was looking at the trend line this morning for the proofs. The first three, Washington, Adams and Jefferson, sold out 20,000 proofs. The Madison coin sold 18,355 followed by Monroe, 7,910; Adams, 5,720; Jackson, 6,112, and Van Buren, 5,011.

Except for the hopeful uptick that occurred in the Jackson total, it is obvious that sales are heading almost straight down.

Where is the bottom? Approximately how many people are so committed to buying these coins that the sales totals can fall no lower?

I don’t really know, but perhaps history is a guide. It is interesting just how similar these totals are to the mintages of the gold commemorative coins of the early 20th century.

The 1903 Louisiana Purchase $1 gold commems had mintages of 17,500 each for the Jefferson and McKinley designs.

The 1904 and 1905 Lewis and Clark dollars had mintages of 10,025 and 10,041, respectively.

The 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition gold dollar and gold $2.50 had mintages of 15,000 and 6,749, respectively.

The 1916 and 1917 McKinley gold dollars had mintages of 15,000 and 5,000, respectively.

The Grant Memorial dollar of 1922 had mintages of 5,016 and 5,000 of the star and no star designs, respectively.

In 1926 there was a spike higher for the gold $2.50 for the 150th anniversary of American Independence. The mintage totaled 46,019.

Despite the fact that the population now is about three times what it was at the beginning of the 20th century, and the coin collecting population is many multiples greater than that, it is interesting that collectors are buying these coins at roughly the same rate as their great-grandfathers a century ago.

Perhaps that means the floor for the First Spouse coins is around 5,000 pieces, too, and there might be hope for a sales spike higher when we get to truly popular Presidents who are still remembered by this generation of hobbyists.

But it will be a very long wait until we get to the issues for the wives of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to test this hypothesis.

One thing I can always count on as a newspaper editor is that readers are the best proof readers. No matter how many times I read through material before it goes to press, the possibility is always there that I missed something.

If a typo slips through and is published, somebody always points it out to me. I appreciate the feedback.

This morning as I tried to clear my head for thinking, the thought occurred to me that what I wrote for a time line in my Thursday blog was a week off.

I mentioned heading for the American Numismatic Association convention in Portland, Ore., next week when I should have written in two weeks.

What was I thinking? Well, as with most things, I was in a hurry, my mind apparently was elsewhere and my glance at the calendar did not register the correct information in my brain.

But what is interesting is that nobody called me on it. I don’t know whether to thank everybody for being so polite so as not to mention the mistake, or to wonder if the topic was so bad that nobody bothered to read enough of it to bother with it.

In either case, I am sorry and I will try harder. A blog may be more casual than something for the print medium, but it still should be correct. When it isn’t, I will not hesitate to call myself on it.

Just to be clear, I head for Portland March 11. I am looking forward to it. I have enjoyed my prior visits there.

Do I plan my blogs?

The short answer is that I do not.

I just go where the current of the hobby river seems to take me. Sometimes I resist the current and say so.

Gold has been a much covered topic in the past couple of years here, but I cannot be all gold all the time as investment advisory letters have the option of doing.

I have been interested in gold since Charles de Gaulle tried to run the dollar by demanding gold payment in 1968. It redounded against the French president when he was forced to devalue the French franc.

I remember paying $7 each for British sovereigns. Wow, I must be old.

In short, for  me, gold is an eternally interesting topic. It is timely almost any time and it is sure to generate good reader interest as long as it is part of a variety of topics over the course of my week and month.

This week it was hard to miss the timely nature of the precious metal.

However, at this moment, that’s enough. I have no idea what I am going to write on Monday.

By this time next week I will be in Portland, Ore., for the National Money Show held by the American Numismatic Association.

Fortunately for me, this trip does not involve jet lag as my recent trip to Berlin did, but a two-hour time difference is still enough so that my stomach growls at inopportune times.

Politics will be in the air. It is the ANA election year. There will be a candidate forum. I chose not to be a part of it in any official questioner or moderator capacity because it is impossible to both cover an event and be a part of it at the same time.

While I understand why candidate forums are held, usually the field is so large that the participants get little time to really say anything that would help a voter make up his or her mind.

Those persons who attend will probably come out feeling the same way as they did going in.

I could be wrong. Someone could fly off the handle and display a temperament that is not congruent with being a good hobby politician, but other than that there usually is little meat, if past forums are any guide.

Why do I go?

Well, you just never know, now do you?

Just how popular are medals produced by the U.S. Mint?

In the last four decades or so in which I have been active, they always have seemed to be the Cinderellas, though in the case of medals, they never went to a ball or met a handsome collector to rescue them.

Years ago I ordered a group of the standard copper Presidential medals for an article. The 1-5/16th-inch medals are all nice looking. The Mint’s workmanship is first-rate.

But in the back of my mind there is always a voice telling me, “These are not coins. These are not coins. Move along to the real thing.”

The medals ended up in a drawer somewhere. I couldn’t tell you where they are now or how long it might take me to find them.

I know there will always be medals in the hobby. Some are interesting. Some catch on as the John Wayne medal did in 1978. But as a group, they just don’t seem to resonate, do they?

Why am I writing this today? Well, I recently did a story about a muled medal where an Abigail Adams obverse was paired with a Louisa Adams reverse in the First Spouse series.

Interesting? Yes, but that voice in the back of my mind still says, “These are not coins.”

Yesterday’s blog focused my attention on just one Mint product, the gold Buffalo one-ounce bullion coin. Naturally, being a collector, I can’t help but broaden out and look at other Mint products with the same question: Do collectors really need them?
Asking this just a couple of months after the Mint made a significant start in cutting back on its hundreds of products might seem odd, but I can’t help it.

Did the Mint go far enough in its pruning?

Take the average, ordinary, run-of-the-mill proof set. Mintages of these used to run to 3 or 4 million year in and year out.

Last year, the Mint produced 1.4 million clad proof sets. That’s truly a sorry figure for the last year of the state quarters and it makes me wonder if there are indeed 140 million collectors of state quarters out there as is claimed. Why don’t they show up in purchases of larger numbers of regular proof sets?

Even if you add the roughly 700,000 silver proof sets that are sold at a far higher price, the 700,000 five-quarter clad set and the 400,000 or so five-quarter silver sets and you get only 3.2 million.

That number is suspiciously like the basic demand for the standard proof set.

What has the Mint gained by scattering demand essentially for the same number of coins across four different sets?

Do the varying prices more than make up for the costs of the different packaging and the differing supply and production lines to put four sets together?

Since I am not privy to individual product profit margins, I assume that the fact that these coin sets were not pruned means that the Mint considers them profitable enough to continue them.

In the old days, anybody who wanted to buy proof examples of just a few of the coins in a proof set had to buy the whole set. For those collectors, these more specialized sets are more convenient.

Yet haven’t even these collectors lost out in what used to be an annual rite of passage for most collectors when just the one set became available?

Perhaps I am too nostalgic today to think rationally.

I don’t like e-mail spam, but even with the best filters, some still gets through. If it is numismatic spam, there is a greater chance of it making it to my inbox.

Perhaps I shouldn’t call any e-mail advertising a numismatic product spam, because after all, this is part of a business that gives me a regular paycheck and keeps me in food and clothing.

This morning I happened to read an interesting offer. It is clever marketing.

What is being sold is a standard one-ounce American Eagle silver bullion coin that is slabbed and grades MS-69. The hook, however, is it is paired with a Proof-69 2009 silver American Eagle.

The catch? Well, the proof version hasn’t been issued yet and a target date for release hasn’t even been revealed.

The e-mail covers that by saying “pre-order.”

However, that word will likely be overlooked by many. I will soon be inundated by e-mails demanding to know how a private firm gets preferential treat by the Mint.

The short answer is it doesn’t. It stands in line like every other business buyer.

But it is first to advertise and that will have a distinct advantage among collectors who hanker after the coin but don’t understand what “pre-order” means.

The best part for the private firm is the price. It is asking $99. That’s a premium price of about twice cost. The bullion coin retails around $20 and the proof when it is issued will be priced around $32. Consider the cost of slabbing roughly matching the discount from retail at which the firm buys the coins and there you are.

Good marketing it is.

It also tells me that the proofs must be about to become available because I don’t believe any business would want its customers to wait too long.

Now I await my first collector e-mail.