Before I went to bed last night, I happened to catch @trumpman’s post about how he got into silver & gold stacking. He was responding to this question from @thisismylife.

I thought I’d do a post giving my answer.

It was actually @trumpman himself that got me into silver. But the roots of my interest in the hobby go back a bit before that, so let’s back up.

Sometime when I was in elementary school, maybe around 8 or 9, my dad bought me one of those cheap penny collection books. US pennies. One of the ones that is made of thick cardboard and had precut holes above dates to push in pennies you find that match the date. Actually he bought two. I got the first, which I think was for pennies from 1909 to 1953 (or thereabouts) and my brother got the book that was 1954 to the present (which was probably sometime in the mid–80s at the time).

He gave me a few pennies to get me started. I don’t remember why the book grabbed my interest so much, but it did. I started looking at every single penny around for dates for my book. I filled up most of the book. My prized find was a 1909 VDB penny. Collectors reading this know that mint copies of those can go for quite a lot. Mine was in terrible shape. My dad told me it was worth about $5. We never took it into a coin shop so it might of commanded more. At any rate, I remember being blown away that a penny could be worth more than a single cent. That really hooked me and pulled me even more into the collecting hobby.

At the time I was aware of silver in coins. My dad had a mason jar full of old half-dollars: Franklins and Liberties. I thought that was cool that coins used to have silver, but it didn’t really register that this was something I had a chance of finding. What my dad should have told me was to look for quarters and dimes from before 1964 as something I could have done. But maybe he did and it just didn’t register with me, who knows. You know how kids are: I might have been distracted with thoughts or He-Man or Transformers or something at the moment he told it to me.

^{via Wikipedia}

Whatever the case may have been, pennies appealed to me more. I went on to find a steel penny from the war years in the wild and that amazed me. My top goal was always to find an Indian-head penny, but I never could track one of those down.

I have no idea what happened to that book of pennies. It may still be packed up in a box in my parent’s basement in the States. One of these days on a trip there I’ll have to look into all my packed up stuff.

So you see, the coin collecting bug was in me. As I got older I never really moved further into the coin collecting hobby, which is unfortunate. I had a paper route in a local hospital, so looking back there’s a pretty good chance that some of those coins the old folks gave me were pre–1964 and had silver. But oh well—we can’t go back, eh?

But the bug was in me.

Ok, back to the present.

A year or so ago, I followed along as Trumpman started posting more and more about silver coins. Honestly, the silver didn’t attract me as much as the coins themselves. Seeing all these cool designs, reading about the coin history, I really enjoyed it.

After reading those posts for awhile, I decided to check out a local coin shop. Unsurprisingly, they had mostly old Japanese coins. I bought one. Soon I visited again and bought another. And before I knew it, I had a box full of old Japanese coins worth quite a bit due to both the collectability of the coins and the silver in them.

^{With lots of dragons - See this post}

At this point I have most of the old Japan coins from the modern era. Chasing older samurai coins or dates would get me into the very expensive territory of collectors, so I want to avoid that.

Around this time, Trumpman introduced me to #silvergoldstackers. I enjoyed talking with everyone there and they quickly voted me a member. It’s a great group. We have great chats.

Now I’ve moved from the older junk silver and have started to buy regular 1oz silver coins or silver rounds whenever I can find them for not much over spot.

And there you go.

Are you into silver or coins? What’s your story? Tell me in the comments or write your own post about it.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.

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