Collecting U.S. Type Coins in the 1930s

Collecting U.S. Type Coins in the 1930s These two beautiful card holders by old-time New York City coin dealer Wayte Raymond (1886-1956), contain nice high-grade U.S. type coins that we purchased from an old collection. These look similar to the normal Wayte Raymond album pages popular in the 1930s, but each holder is loose and they must have been kept in a box to protect the pages from edge bumps. The holders are made of heavy card stock, and each has clear acetate slides (removed here for photographic reasons) that covered each row of coins – similar to present day "Littleton" high quality coin album pages.

Collecting coins by date and mint mark began to gain in popularity once A. G. Heaton published his little 1893 booklet A Treatise on the Coinage of the United States Branch Mints. This booklet revolutionized collecting in the United States. Prior to that, the most popular way to collect coins was by type, or if you were an advanced collector, you might collect a series of coins by year but you paid no attention to the mint mark. While collecting by date and mint mark is now the most popular method, when it comes to the more expensive coin series, a good way to build a representative collection is to assemble one of each major design type. While working on your type coin collection, you might discover a new favorite series, which you can then get into in a bigger way if you choose.

If you are attracted to the earlier U.S. coin types, where examples can be quite expensive, collecting one coin of each design type makes an achievable goal for most collectors. Our Littleton album for collecting 19th Century U.S. type coins [item #LCA78 @ $29.95] is shown above.