5am and I'm coining

[Andrew McCabe]

It's very early in the morning and I'm currently 'coining', as my family call it. Over the last few days I've done a major reorganisation of my bookshelves, consolidating the books that were in two separate apartments into something I can find. I was a bit surprised to find that at the recent Kreindler library sale I bought two duplicates of good books I already had (Niklovitch collection, Hamburger 1925 sale; Riccio on Roman Republic), but I suppose that finding books I didn't know I had can hardly be a problem. I'll take photos of my bookshelves before they descend into chaos again. At the moment, I'm back playing with my coins as a pre-breakfast treat, doing my absolutely favourite task, reorganising my trays and introducing new coins. I've said before that I've slimmed down my collection in recent years, reducing from about 2000 to exactly 1200 coins; my recent additions are so nice, and the existing collection solid enough, that simple upgrading would need discarding coins I really want to keep. So I've added another small Abafil case, bought some new trays, converted some of my 77 coin trays into two 40 coin trays in order to better display struck bronzes alongside silver, net effect is to bring my collection size limit up to 1280 coins, I've have now separated my aes grave into separate trays from the struck silver and bronze - it always looked disjointed when they shared trays, one could hardly see the tiny struck coins, and anyway I'm now convinced that they never circulated together, but in separate circulation areas; I've reviewed the ordering of my anonymous silver and bronze and moved them in with the signed series they mimic rather than in the blanket Crawford RRC 53 (silver) and RRC 56 (bronze) buckets, - and finally (to the loss of keen collectors who've been buying my spare coins) I've reviewed some of the coins intended for future sales and brought some back into the main collection; typically these were odd style variants of types I've already got, but with expanding real estate I think there's room for a few stylistically different type duplicates. There's a major storm blowing outside the window, but I'm comfy with my red trays, my magnifying glass, and a black and white movie playing in the background. Hello Saturday.

[Mat]

I spent last Saturday redoing all my flip tags, making adjustments, adding found large auction sales I didn't know they came from and so on. Was relaxing and brought some new life in them.

Plus many silvers are toning nicely!

[carthago]

Introducing new coins to the collection and the reorganizing that takes place is a favorite Saturday ritual of mine as well.   

[Carausius]

I can't imagine anyone on Forum that could not identify with Andrew's post to some degree. We are all coin nuts, after all!  I was up until 1 am  last night entering photos and information into my collection database for some anticipated new arrivals.  Besides organizing my collection, my next favorite thing...opening the post box and finding a registered mail card!

[cliff_marsland]

That level of dedication tends to indicate why your collection is so nice.  The revamped photos on your site are fantastic and better than ever.  A legacy link to the older site would especially helpful, though, for certain niche situations.  It was a bit easier to quickly find information on individual coins, especially if they were from an unfamiliar genre and/or one did not have the Crawford number immediately at hand, although I did find somewhat of a workaround if I delved into individual coins in the photostream. This is in no way a criticism.  You obviously put a lot of effort into it, and we thank you for your great reference site.   A marriage of the new and old formats would just make the site even more fantastic.



I think we all have been in that situation, per the topic.  While my back would be thrown out if I constantly tried to re-arrange heavy 16" records, I spend a ton of time transferring and cleaning up shows.  Success with any hobby is commensurate with time invested.  Happily, coins are much easier to organize and easier to lift.

We can all commiserate with the excitement of a juicy new addition, whether it be a new Shadow or a nifty coin.  One doesn't have to declick the coin, which is a bonus.

Per bookshelves, who has enough?  I think we all need an estate the size of the Biltmore.  While e-books are convenient for many, there's nothing better, in many cases - though coins are well-suited to electronic pictures -  than the actual book, in my opinion.  Same with newspapers or radio scripts, or anything paper.

Andrew's Saturday sounds quite pleasant, especially in foul weather.  

[Andrew McCabe]

That level of dedication tends to indicate why your collection is so nice.  The revamped photos on your site are fantastic and better than ever.  A legacy link to the older site would especially helpful, though, for certain niche situations.  It was a bit easier to quickly find information on individual coins, especially if they were from an unfamiliar genre and/or one did not have the Crawford number immediately at hand, although I did find somewhat of a workaround if I delved into individual coins in the photostream. This is in no way a criticism.  You obviously put a lot of effort into it, and we thank you for your great reference site.   A marriage of the new and old formats would just make the site even more fantastic.

Hi Cliff

Thanks for the nice post. As you'll have seen in the parallel post, I got diverted shortly after this thread to my bookshelves and their photography, so made no more progress on coin rearranging, but, hey, that means the pleasant task still lies ahead.

Re. website, I know you appreciate that the website has evolved. In fact on my home page I keep links to the legacy site and have never deleted anything. Some of the format changes, and directions to the older pages, are explained here:
http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/#newblog
and if you scroll immediately up from the point this link bring you to, you find the old home-page index format, as it was when I changed the page in Jan 2013. And my signature below has the best way to access the coins, not by searching Flickr but using the tree format of Collections / Sets.

Of course, the current overall site is a mishmash of the old and the new. As perspective for those who don't know the site that long, it started out as a book review site (no coin pictures!) in 2004. The reason for not including coins then was total lack of bandwidth and storage capacity (2004 is centuries ago in internet time...) and a suitable platform for the coins; the coin pictures only arrived in 2009, shortly after Flickr was launched. At that point, I integrated the coins into the existing book review pages by linking to one or more coin sets on each website page. Then I began adding hosted articles to the pages (by Crawford, Buttrey, and others with their permissions), and the individual web-pages became monsters. I also added a blog page which I updated regularly for about 4 years, but stopped about a year ago, mainly because I couldn't find a good home for that page where it would get read. To simplify for people just looking for coins, I then created the link to the Flickr collections (as per my signature line) and then last year I created the concept of displaying the coins in their red trays, and that became the new main index of http://andrewmccabe.ancients.info/

Of course it now needs a thorough spring clean. Not least, the book side has been neglected, and with my library now looking nice and smart it's time to create a set of new book pages. I also intend to revamp the 'red trays' pages so that you can get links to all individual coins (via small thumbnails) as well as to my own collection coins. I couldn't do this 12 months ago because Flickr restricted downloaded images per webpage to 20, another eternity in internet time later and they couldn't care less if I reproduce all of Crawford's plates on some webpages.

All this will take a great deal of time, especially as I do all the html programming by hand - I don't even use blogger tools such as Wordpress to set up a skin as I find it cleaner for the long term to keep to a very simple interface where I personally understand every line of code. So, what will really happen is what's been happening for the last decade: gradual improvements from time to time, with in time, some old pages finally retired. The search field, for coins, works pretty well, so if just looking for coins, use the search field that's at the top of every page, below the language buttons that translate into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Portugues and Arabic.

The future concept is that the entry page will take you one of three places: (1) coins, (2) books, or (3) hosted articles, and that everything will mesh nicely together, and link seamlessly under that umbrella. It'll arrive very slowly. By the time it arrives I'll be busy working on another new concept, making the pages especially friendly for the smart-glasses and smart-watches of 2018 I suppose.

Half-seriously, I thought of setting up a Twitter feed, to periodically let collectors know when I've uploaded a bunch of new coin photos or when I'm looking at an archaeological site or in a museum or when I've modified a web-page. But the concept of pushing messages out seems terribly narcissistic and instead, I use Forum, and am trusting on Forum's software to become more mobile/cellular friendly over time. I won't do facebook. When I've previously tried facebook, every ebay dealer whom I might have bought a totally worn denarius off a decade ago friended me within minutes, not to mention sellers of mixed-bags of modern small change and buyers of scrap gold. And anyway time spent on facebook directly stole from time spent here chatting to you guys, and facebook page development time stole from website or photo-site development time. So, here I am! Hello.

[Meepzorp]

Hi Andrew,

I do my "coining" at "whatever o'clock".

Time of day has no meaning to me. It never did - even when I was young and healthy (when I was in high school, college, graduate school, etc.). Come to think of it, days and years have no meaning to me either. For the past 24 years, I've always asked people, "What day is today?" or "What year is this?" My relatives are always joking with me about that (that I never know what day or year it is).

Meepzorp

[gordian_guy]

Andrew and other fellow collectors,

It is wonderful to see that we all share some common habits - I like to get up early (always have) spend time reading Forum, then delving into the collection, either working with new acquisitions (few so far this year) or reorg'ing the older collections. I just cleaned up the storage of my Roman Imperial coins, which had languished neglected for a very long time when I moved to Provincials. I also like to be up very late (often not going to bed at all) reading - I have piles of research papers from various numismatic and art history journals pile up that need reading and translating (a tedious process for a person who did poorly on his languages in college!!).

I don't collect Roman Provincials any longer but Andrew, your webpage is a place I visit frequently because it is very well organized and full of relevant information. I have been too lazy to get my Gordian III page up and going. Maybe this year...

Thank you again for sharing,

c.rhodes

[cliff_marsland]

Oh cool.  We'll look forward to new additions to the site.  I had no idea it was hand-coded.

Double cool.  The small thumbnails will be an invaluable help. I also meant to add, but forgot, about accessing the site from a  "smart" phone.  It's very useful to have that guide.  The return of the thumbs would be awesome.

It would sure be nice to do some coining.  Maybe in the spring.  I just don't have the time.  I have a few more thousand shows to clean or fix in just the last batch alone.  I should set the crappier ones aside and make some time for coining. 

We all look forward to new additions to the site.  The articles are also very interesting.

[SC]

I love all of your interesting posts but I am not sure the pedant in me is ready for "coining".

To me coining might possibly be a synonym for striking coins.  Just.

But having spent decades attacking my relatives, and some family friends, when they claim to be "crafting" ("you are NOT crafting, you are not even being crafty, you are doing a craft, and for goodness sake be more specific") I am not ready to give in and go with "coining".  Yet.

 

Shawn