HOWARD DANIEL ON BUILDING A NUMISMATIC LIBRARY

I started collecting Southeast Asian numismatic pieces in 1964. Very few world numismatic references were available to buy back then. Even fewer were about Southeast Asia, and I bought them. I also bought non-Southeast Asian references with formats I liked, because I planned to someday start writing my own references.

While overseas in the Army, I kept little with me, especially during my six years in the Vietnam War. I mailed everything to my mother to store for me. I told her that all nonregistered mail was for her and all registered was for her to store for me. My time overseas and in the Vietnam War ended in January 1973.

I was a student/assistant instructor in an Army school when my wife, Phung, arrived in the United States in February. To give her something to do, I had all of my stuff stored at my mother’s home shipped to me. Phung could go through the contents and sort them down for me.

I graduated and was assigned to a research job in Reston, Va. I had bought a large used station wagon, but our stuff barely fit inside it when we drove off from Indiana.

We rented an apartment and went shopping for some furniture. Phung did not want us to go into debt, so we bought a sleep sofa. We used a large cardboard box for our dining table and sat on flattened boxes. Each month we bought one or two more pieces of furniture for cash. Two of them, eventually, were bookcases, which quickly filled up.

Later, I had an office desk and a third bookcase. One day I came home and a used IBM Selectric Typewriter was on a stand next to my desk. Phung told me, since I said I wanted to write my own references, let’s get started! Within two years, I self-published my first catalog in 100 copies. They sold so fast I forgot to keep one and had to buy one back!

I received emergency orders for Germany and while there, bought many more references in European languages, and published another catalog. During some missions in England, I had time in London before my return flight. At one bookstore, I opened a book and found the owner was an author in my library. I asked the bookstore owner how he obtained the book.

He told me that he heard a rumor about him passing away and he contacted his widow. She was about to trash his personal library because a local library refused it. He showed me several boxes of his books and I bought many of them. Those books are still very important references to me and they could have ended up in a dumpster!

After we arrived back in Virginia in early 1979, we had to buy a condo with an extra room for books. The condo cost more but it paid off in the future when we sold it. On Sunday afternoons, we visited used bookstores in the Washington, D.C., area. I found few books for myself but many for other numismatists at only 25 to 50 cents each. The people selling the numismatist’s libraries did not know their value and sold them to junk book dealers. In the numismatic book market, some were worth over $100 each.

To read the complete article, see: A life in the U.S. Army helped in building numismatic library (www.coinworld.com/articles/a-life-in-the-u-s-army-helped-in-building-num)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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