How I Got Two Genuine 1877 Indian Head Cents for Eight Dollars

(Or, Cherrypicking World Coins - Even If You Don't Collect Them)

By Robertson W. Shinnick, World Numismatist

(Note: I don't know how "helpful" this little tale will be, but please give me your vote of confidence if you find it entertaining, anyway.  It's mostly just a personal reminiscence with perhaps a few small nuggets of humble wisdom thrown in.  Really, it's more about world coins than rare Indian Head cents- those just happened to be the payoff in this particular story.)

OK, here goes. (True Story).

It's the year 7 B.C. or so (that's seven years Before Computer, in other words, about 1992 in my case).

Asheville, North Carolina.  A prior career and marriage- a completely different life than the one I live now.  I went into Wright's Coin Shop to sell a few pitiful coins I had, since we were dirt poor and living hand-to-mouth on food stamps, and were having many of our utilities shut off on us.

I don't remember what I sold, but after selling my meager treasures, I happened to notice that Bill Wright had stacks and stacks of British large pennies on his desk.  Hundreds of 'em.  And also a bunch of other world coins.  I gushingly told him how much I liked Brit pennies, as they were old and big and cheap and cool, blah blah blah.

So Bill, sensing my enthusiasm, said I could have the whole hoard of "foreign" coins for 10 cents each.  There's a catch, though: I had to buy them all.  (You see, Bill seemed to hate "foreign" stuff for the most part, and usually dumped it as fast as possible).  There were about 400 coins in the hoard he was offering me.  At ten cents a coin, that works out to...

...forty bucks.  Practically a king's ransom to me in those poverty-stricken days.

Oh, well.  I threw caution to the wind and spent the forty bucks on that hoard of world coins, leaving me slightly poorer than I had been when I came into the shop.  (What my then-wife didn't know wouldn't hurt her, right?).  I then examined all the coins, using the Krause Standard Catalog as a guide.

Conservatively graded, what do you suppose was the total catalog value of that 400-piece lot that had cost me forty bucks I couldn't afford to spend?

$1,280.00.

Cha-ching!

Most of the Brit pennies were key or semi-key dates, strangely enough.  There were several "KN" and "H" mintmarked coins, and multiple Uncirculated 1950 and '51 pennies- better dates.  Obviously these were from an old collection rather than just a random accumulation.  In fact, there was nearly a complete date set of pennies from Victorian times on up, lacking only a few common dates and the impossibly rare 1933.  There was a nice 1752 halfpenny in there, too.  And a Swedish billon solidus from the 1640s.  And an Irish coin worth ninety bucks by itself.  Not to mention a large number of Dutch coins from the late 1800s and early 1900s, including plenty of silver.  The list of finds went on and on.

Now, these are foreign coins, mind you.  I live in the South and sold coins at the redneck flea market occasionally.  My chances of getting twelve hundred bucks out of this lot of coins locally, let alone selling very many of them at all, was roughly equivalent to my chances of playing tiddlywinks with my ears.

BUT- I knew I could try to swap them, using the free classified ads in the back of Numismatic News. (Hey, this was before eBay, remember?)

It  turned out that an old swapping partner of mine in Indiana was interested in swapping for the Dutch coins from the lot.  They had a combined catalog value of around $350.00 or so, and there were about eighty of them.  So, if you figure I paid ten cents apiece for the eighty Dutch coins, as I had for the rest of the lot, it means I had about eight dollars invested in them.

All right, so now I was out eight bucks plus the cost of shipping the Dutch coins to Sam in Indiana.  In return, Sam sent me a fantastically beautiful 1937 British fifteen-piece proof set in the original case.  A sweeeeeet set, with fantastic toning!  It was worth about $185.00 catalog at the time, so Sam got the better end of the trade in catalog value, but I didn't mind that one teeny little bit.

I kept and admired that lovely set for a while.  Then, one day, on a whim, I took it into Bill Wright's shop.  This is the same dealer who disliked foreign coins and who'd sold me the box of "junk" that started the whole thing, remember.  Well, Bill, who's a seasoned professional numismatist and no dummy, loved the British proof set, and believe me, Bill is a hard man to impress with US coins, let alone British ones.

I forget how it happened, exactly, but when I left the shop that afternoon, Bill had ended up with my lovely 1937 British proof set, and I had two U.S. 1877 Indian Head cents in exchange.  (I was sort of working on a low-grade Indian cent collection at the time.)  The 1877 is the key date to the Indian cent series, and I had two of them!  They were low grade but genuine.  (One graded AG/G with no problems, and the other was G/VG with some counting wheel damage across the headband.)

So, let's sum up:

$40.00 to Bill for a box of world coins (400 coins at ten cents each).

$8.00 of that investment was for 80 Dutch coins (80 coins at ten cents each).

Traded the Dutch coins to Sam in Indiana, got a 1937 British proof set in return.

Traded the British proof set back to Bill Wright, got two 1877 Indian cents in return.

Presto.  Two genuine 1877 Indian cents for eight bucks.  (OK, so it's a little convoluted, but there you have it.)

Upon selling the 1877 cents, I had reaped a considerable financial gain by acting as a middleman between two people who both knew considerably more about numismatics than I did.  I told Bill how well I had done on the deal, too.  His only reply was, "Good for you".  He still didn't really care that he'd sold me $1,280.00 worth of world coins for forty dollars.  It wasn't worth his time to mess with them, he said.

Oh, yeah- icing on the cake- I got four or five hundred more dollars out of the rest of that forty-dollar box of "foreign junk", though it took me another two years or so to get it, and I sold the coins well below their catalog values.

The morals of this rambling tale:

One: Never turn up your nose at "foreign junk", just because you personally aren't into it.  It's a potential gold mine, not to mention it's educational and fun.  Plus the coins are interesting and beautiful.  Even if you don't collect it, you can cherrypick it, sell it, and buy stuff that does interest you.  Of course, it is time-consuming, and it does require some patience.  And plenty of homework, with the right books.  Which brings me to the next point...

Two: Money spent on reference books is never wasted, even if you don't end up using the books much.  A few months before all the trades that took place in this tale, I'd sought to educate myself, and had spent the then-unimaginable sum of $120.00 on the the ANA Centennial special hardcover editions of the Krause Standard Catalog of World Coins, which covered basically every coin in the world from 1701 on up.  At the time, that was the most comprehensive coverage on world coins in a single publication, and the Krause catalog remains the standard today. (I do wish they'd come out with another hardcover special edition).  Those $120.00 books represented a huge sacrifice for me, considering my poverty at the time.  I had to save up a long time to get them.  However, they were the keys to a vast new kingdom of knowledge, and that investment paid for itself, many, many times over.  Without those Krause catalogs, I wouldn't have known what I had when I bought that box of world coins from Bill.

Did I get lucky in my cherrypicking?  Sure I did.  The average bulk lot of world coins is not likely to be loaded with key dates and silver.  But Lady Luck seems to favor those who do their homework, and those who are persistent.

And I did all this before I had ever heard the word "Internet"- a few years before there was this wonderful global flea market called eBay. 

There are bargains galore to be had out there, folks.  And plenty of slick operators and con artists, too, of course, just like any flea market has.  But the cherrypickin' can be good.  Keep a sharp eye out and never be afraid to learn- sometimes that odd trivial knowledge can pay off in unexpected ways. 

Say, did I tell you about the genuine 1694 Thick Planchet London Elephant token I plucked out of a small $2.00 bulk lot right here on eBay?  Shoot, I didn't even spot that one until after I'd pulled the Buy-It-Now trigger!

Well, that's another story. One of many.  Why, I'll bet you there are three, four, a dozen, a hundred rare old coins sitting unrecognized in bulk lots listed on eBay... right at this very minute. 

Happy hunting-I wish you the best of luck in spotting and grabbing them!

...unless I happen to see 'em first, that is!

-RWS