KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART TWO

GREG BENNICK: That's great. That's great. I love it. So, okay. So, what do you collect and how did you get your start in collecting given that myriad of things you could have been interested in that you mentioned a few minutes ago?

KELLEN HOARD: Yeah. So, I'll start, I'll start with the start. My grandparents used to travel quite a bit. They weren't collectors themselves, but they'd accumulate foreign coins in their travels and they'd always bring them back to me. I would take them and put them in a jar in my room and not really look at them much further. But one day when I was about nine, I said, "I should probably take a look at those." So, I dumped them out of a jar, and started taking a look at them. They really were quite compelling to me. So, I started out... I put foreign coins in two by twos that I got for Christmas. I did the 50 state quarters as well.

So that was the start. It was U.S. coins and foreign coins as my first two categories. Of course, it's narrowed since then. What am I collecting right now? That is a good question. That's a question I'm asking myself. What am I collecting right now? A couple of different things. One of the ones that has persistently been interesting, but is a sub niche of a sub niche, is sample slabs. For those who aren't familiar this is basically when grading services will give out holders promotionally at shows or to YNs or at luncheons or any number of different occasions. They'll give out these holders and they usually say "sample" on them. Not always though. There's an active debate about what exactly is a sample slab when there are so many different gray areas with so many different kinds of slabs.

But I've been collecting those for a long time. It's a neat field because there's constantly new ones being made and not just by a couple of services, but by a bunch of what we call "basement graders," people who set up shop in their basement to grade everything as 70 for three days and then quit. They also happen to make samples labs. So, I've been collecting them. It's neat because there's constantly new ones being discovered. You have a chance to really find things nobody's seen before, and that's really quite a bit of fun.

GREG BENNICK: And where not many were made. Probably very limited.

KELLEN HOARD: But of course, it's a supply and demand thing, right? I have a sample slab of which one in the world exists and it's worth maybe a couple hundred dollars. A unique coin in the US federal series is going to be millions, right? You definitely see that sense of scale there. I've been doing that for a while. I have a great time doing that. I collect numismatic literature. That's one of many shelves. I have been recently collecting exonumia from my hometown of Kirkland, Washington, so I'm having a great time tracking down what even exists in that set as well. Not only that, but taking advantage of, actually, the hunt. The thrill of the hunt.

There was a local bar that issued tokens in the forties. So I went to the bar. I've never been there before. I'm amazed they let me in. I'm underage. But I went to the local bar and tracked down a guy who had been going there for decades and was able to talk to him and track down some of these pieces. So, it's fun. It's like a treasure hunt to figure out what you can do.

I'm an international affairs student. So, I've also been trying to trace, 20th century geopolitics through numismatics. You can see changes to money and all this kind of stuff.

So those are a couple of different things. The big coup for me though, was that I was at a coin shop, maybe about a year ago. My girlfriend happened to be in the car with me. We pulled over and I said, "Could you come in and just hang out with me for a couple of minutes while I look at this?" And she said, "Yes." Again, wonderful for her to do that. When I went inside to look at the coins, I said, "Why don't you just go look through that junk box of foreign coins and see what catches your eye?"

By the time I finished my business, I asked, "Are you ready to go?" She said, "No, no, no. I'm looking through this box." She said, "I'm really quite interested." She pulled out maybe like 25 different coins that she liked and they were about 25 cents apiece. So, I bought them for her. And on the ride home, she was fascinated by them. She loved the designs and she liked Googling to find the story behind those designs. She's quite the traveler. I suggested that we collect one coin from every country as a kind of a fun little set, in line with her traveling. And we're doing that together now. I don't think she realizes she's collecting coins.

We're keeping it that way. It's been great. We're collecting coins together. I just don't think she realizes that we are. That's been quite nice.

The only other thing I collect is things for that reference set I mentioned earlier to share with people something that will catch people's interest.

GREG BENNICK: That's amazing. I love the top secret, backhanded way of getting your partner to collect coins. It's brilliant.

KELLEN HOARD: Yeah, that's been the approach so far. We've built up quite a set. The real difficulty, honestly, was figuring out which countries to include, because you can do, you know, UN member states. But does that include countries like Kosovo or Palestine or different ones like this? No. There's endless gray areas. So, we chose which microstates to include and things like that. So, it's been fun in that way as well.

GREG BENNICK: I love this. Good work. That's fantastic. That's a great way of bringing in a new collector. You know, people all the time are trying to figure out how to bring in new collectors and what's the angle. And I guess the angle is get them to collect without realizing they're collecting. That's a new Kellen Hoard technique, a patented copyright.

KELLEN HOARD: Maybe not a sustainable approach, but definitely, one to get them.

GREG BENNICK: I think I might try that. I might try that with, my girlfriend and say, I really like circles. Circles are really interesting. Oh, these things have circles. Let's, let's collect these.

KELLEN HOARD: Well, honestly, not just circles. There's so many shapes. There was, an article in The Numismatist maybe a decade ago about like someone trying to collect every number of signs, as many signs as they could. There you go. You know, interesting geometry. There's great opportunity.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime on the web or via instagram @minterrors.

To watch the complete video, see:
Kellen Hoard Interviewed for the NNP by Greg Bennick (https://youtu.be/tBb-Bt4NR8k)

To read the complete transcript, see:
Kellen Hoard Interviewed for the NNP by Greg Bennick (Transcript) (https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/641580)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
KELLEN HOARD INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v27/esylum_v27n41a24.html)

 

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