My Life
... as a currency collector
Of course, we're all currency collectors. Life in the
modern world makes it necessary. We all spend our time collecting
as much currency as possible so that we can trade it with all the people
who supply us with the things we really need, or if we're lucky, all the
things we really want.
But I mean collecting currency in the hobby, if somewhat stupid sense. You know, spending $10 for something that says it's worth $1.
This has been something of an on-and-off again proposition for me. I started out being a coin collector, but to tell the truth, I find amassing little caches of misformed rocks to be somewhat boring. What I find far more interesting are the little bits of ephemera that we exchange on a daily basis. Not only is there more artwork involved in paper money than in coins, but it's far more delicate, and liable to be destroyed.
This started out with a normal obsessive interest in
money. I read up on who was on what size note, what all the federal
reserve banks were, and what all those numbers and letters all over the
things meant. But this was just an interest in those items I was
collecting in order to be spent. The change happened one day
when I found something different in my pocket change:
Well, this was something different. It didn't say "Federal Reserve Note." It said it was redeemable in Silver. Was it possible that there was more than one kind of money?
Then on another day, I was given a two dollar bill.
Hey, what's this? Not a Federal Reserve Note, not a Silver Certificate. United States Note? What was that? In later weeks, I also spied Gold Certificates at a coin collector's store. In my immature mind, I suddenly realized that there was a lot more to money than what we get from the Trilateral Commission!
So, I
collected bits and pieces here and there, and didn't really do anything
very intense until I saw my first new hundred dollar bill (or "hundred
dollar note" as we collectors say. I didn't like it. What I
didn't like the most was the fact that the lines were jagged and the ink
seemed smeared in places. Gone was the delicate artwork with sharp,
clean lines. Now, things looked a little foggier, with the ink
bleeding all over the place. Or, maybe not all over the place, but bad
enough for me to complain.
This left me in a big rush to go find some of that good ol' sharp looking
currency before the bad new messy stuff took over. What probably
surprised me the most is that it's still possible to find completely
uncirculated examples of all kinds of currency, albeit at a price.
One wonders what, outside of being a fanatic like me, would possess
a person to take perfectly ordinary currency out of circulation - before
it's even entered circulation - only to hang onto it for a few decades.
Of course, some peoples' idea of
what "uncirculated" means may differ from others.
In the process of assembling my collection, I've formulated a few ideas about what money is all about, and what currency related terminology means. At present time, I only collect US currency, and only "small sized" currency at that.
I have no intention of showing the contents of my collection here. For a while, I did have a fairly popular site devoted to collecting (and the history of) United States currency. It was a pretty good site, but it got to be too big a pain in the butt to maintain, so I shut it down. I s'pose if you really want to see it bad enough, you might be able to find it on the wayback machine or something.
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