COIN BOARD NEWS NUMBER 40 PUBLISHED

VINTAGE COIN BOARD SIGHTINGS I’ve come across two more appearances of coin boards in old photos published within The E-Sylum, the online newsletter of the Numismatic Bibliomania Society (www.coinbooks.org), and these are included with this issue of CBN. The first shows coin dealer William A. Gaede of the Pittsburgh Coin Exchange in a photo that originally ran in the May 1941 issue of The Hobbyist. On a shelf to his right are four Colonial Coin and Stamp Company boards.

In the second photo, which dates to about 1979, Robert W. Cornerly poses behind his desk at Rare Coins of Georgia in Atlanta. On that desk is another CC&S board that is just barely identifiable as Eagle/Indian Cent board C1¢A2b. Here’s a link to The E-Sylum article: http://www.coinbooks.org/
esylum_v19n32a16.html. If you’re not reading this weekly newsletter you’re really missing out on the heart and soul of numismatic literary research and gossip.

RESEARCHING COIN BOARDS, FOLDERS AND ALBUMS Since there’s almost nothing on these subjects published, aside from my own books and newsletters, attempting to learn more can be challenging. The recent arrival of easily searchable archives such as those of the Newman Numismatic Portal (https://nnp.wustl.edu) and the American Numismatic Association’s journal, The Numismatist (https://money.org), does help considerably. Still, I have to do a lot of digging the Old School way by buying and reading vintage coin company catalogs and coin hobby guidebooks. These are time capsules into what coin storage products were available, who published them and how much they cost when new. This has proved to be more necessary in researching coin folders and albums than it was with coin boards, as the latter were in production for such a short time.

I’ve amassed quite a library of little paperback books of the sort that other collectors of numismatic literature disdain. For example, I came back from this year’s incarnation of the annual ANA book sale with a carton full of old catalogs that were purchased at 25 cents apiece from the “no one cares” pile. This hoard included long runs of the annual catalogs put out by Bebee’s in Omaha and Tatham Stamp and Coin Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. Both always featured coin holders and other supplies and have proved to be the richest sources of detailed information. For example, the 1940 Tatham catalog included a full-page ad for Whitman’s Third Edition coin boards, though that company’s name was not mentioned. This ad is reproduced herein, along with a vintage postal cover from the company dating from the 1920s that I recently acquired.

For more information, see:
www.coincollectingboards.com/

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web