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.

The 40-page Coin Market price guide section of Numismatic News goes to press later today.

Rising prices of gold, silver and platinum are pushing up prices for all sorts of coins, from the scuzziest pre-1965 quarter to the finest of proofs.

Longtime readers might be interested to know that any silver coin is worth approximately 10 times face value. That makes an easy calculation. A dime is a dollar, a quarter $2.50 and a half dollar is $5. This is approximate because of the daily price fluctuation. At yesterday’s close of $13.711 per troy ounce, it actually works out to a fraction more than 9.91 times face.

The old Morgan and Peace silver dollars were not struck to the same weight standard as those other silver coins. They weigh in at 0.7734 troy ounces of actual silver weight. A dollar face value of the other coins adds up to 0.7234 troy ounces.

The dealer rule of thumb calls the 0.7234 number 0.715, or 715 ounces per $1,000 face value, to account for wear. That makes the multiple 9.8 times face value.

Whatever you want to call it, as high as silver is, collectors with memories of 1980 might consider silver a laggard this time around. The present price is far from the $50 peak while gold is less than $100 from its old peak of $850 a troy ounce.

Will silver catch up? It could spurt a little, but it must be remembered that a good deal of silver’s price in 1980 was due to an attempted corner of the market led by Nelson Bunker Hunt. Without that factor, the 1980 high might have been significantly lower, perhaps somewhere near where the price is now.

Ten times face value, though, is a nice floor to any collector’s worth. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be happy to get more. We’ll see.

Stock market traders say you shouldn’t resist a trend. I won’t resist it for my choice of topic today.

The first thing I did when I arrived at the office and signed into my computer was check what gold and platinum products were currently being sold by the U.S. Mint.

Nothing had changed since my two-line entry of yesterday. But that itself is news. No product has been put back on sale. Only the proof platinum American Eagle coins are still available.

How long with they last? Platinum rose yesterday. It closed at $1,420.40 a troy ounce. The proof platinum one-ounce American Eagle price is $1,599.95. The difference of $179.55 still seems to be safely large enough for sales to continue if I employ my newly minted $100 tripwire hypothesis.

Nobody outside the Mint knows if that is true or not. Even Mint personnel don’t know what the price of the precious metal will do on the markets today or next week.

My advice to anyone who has been considering buying a proof platinum American Eagle or a an Eagle set should probably act now to make sure that they get what they want.

Whether these are good investments is another question entirely. The one-ounce proof has a sales total of 1,839 so far. The proof half ounce is less than half of that at 752. The quarter ounce is 860. The tenth ounce is 1,569. That might be the sleeper. The uncirculated “W” platinum tenth ounce has a sales total of 2,688, making the proof relatively much scarcer as an individual sales option. But we need to consider the sets in my evaluation.

The four-coin platinum American Eagle proof set has a sales total of 3,130, comfortably more than the 1,951 unc. sets.

To be absolutely accurate on totals, you have to add individual numbers to the set numbers to arrive at the correct number for each individual piece.

If you do that for the tenth ounce proof you get 4,699 coins. The “W” unc. tenths total 4,639. These numbers are almost identical. Isn’t that interesting?

Mint Director Ed Moy has his work cut out for him. His mission is to promote the use of $1 coins. It is not an easy task under the best of circumstances, but just how hard it is becomes obvious when I read a story on one of my favorite Web sites, www.coinflation.com.

This site keeps track of the prices of copper, zinc and nickel and the values of U.S. coinage made out of base metals.

With the nickel containing almost 7 cents’ worth of metal, it is useful to keep track of the fluctuations, so I have reason to visit the site regularly.

But there is an added appeal. The site also posts interesting stories. Yesterday one of those stories that make collectors shake their heads in disbelief was posted from the Peoria Journal Star. It reported a police investigation.

What was the crime? Passing counterfeit coins at a Macomb, Ill., restaurant.

Circulating counterfeit coins are unusual. The low values don’t offer criminals sufficient reward for the trouble of making the fakes. My interest was aroused.

Four coins were passed. Each featured a different portrait. One was George Washington, another was John Adams, a third was Thomas Jefferson and the fourth, the coin that set off the investigation shows the head of ... drum roll, please ... James Madison. This “suspicious” coin was spotted by an unnamed banker. Why,   the coin is not due out until later this year. It must be fake, the banker’s reasoning went.

“The coins appeared to have come from a collector’s proof set,” the story says.

The banker and the police have all the salient facts to make a correct determination. Instead of concluding that the coins were genuine and someone simply had broken up a proof set to spend, they launch an ominous sounding counterfeit investigation.

Even if we can’t teach numismatics to bankers, perhaps they could be taught criminal psychology. That would have saved police a lot of bother. No  crook is going to try to spend something of very low value that stands out from ordinary cash transactions. Making oneself conspicuous for $4 just doesn’t cut it.

My compliments, though, to the restaurant that accepted the coins. That establishment took the coins and then deposited them with its bank.

Director Moy can call it one small success in his campaign.