 The Festival of Coins is brought to you in partnership with the Numismatic Guarantee Corporation and the Royal Mint Museum. So good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us today for the Festival of Coins. Today we're talking to Douglas Mud from the Money Museum at the American Numismatic Association. So Doug, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for your time today. Thanks man, I'm happy to be here. It's a great morning so it should be a lot of fun here in the US anyway. Yes, yeah well it's a lovely day here too, just getting to four o'clock in the afternoon here. It's been a very sunny day for once so we're making the most of it before winter appears. So just to give you an introduction, Douglas took over the position of the curator at the Money Museum in July 2004, that's based in Colorado Springs, he's the author of All the Money in the World which is published under the Smithsonian imprint and I think that was in October 2006 and Doug has just a wealth of knowledge about coins and also about US history so we're going to kind of tap into a bit of that today. So to get started Doug I wonder if you could tell us how you first became involved in coins yourself? Well that's an interesting story in itself because my father was a diplomat, he was an American diplomat and we lived all over the world. He had gotten interested in coins as in college and so as I was growing up I saw coins all around the house and watched him and was interested in it and I began being interested myself at about the age of 11 when I began following him around in Bolivia of all places and looking at Spanish colonial coins and that was an interesting place because you'd have street vendors who would come down from the mountains and they'd bring things that they found there that they thought the tourists or people would be interested in. They realized oh well the American diplomat he's interested in coins and so they bring coins for him so we'd go around the different places where they'd have their stalls or booths set up and they'd show him the coins and I got very interested. I still have my first coin which was a little quarter real with a yama and a castle on it and but I became interested at that point and then we moved to Syria soon afterwards and in Syria I became interested in Roman and Greek coins particularly Roman coins because you saw the ruins everywhere and my parents were both very interested in archaeology and and all that so we went to a lot of places you know Palmyra, Jarash, Petra, places that are some of them are famous as in the movies even with the with Petra now the gallery is shown in various movies but so I became interested in that and I started collecting basically world coins and then started collecting us coins. I had my little book of us sense filling in the holes and all that kind of thing and then once I got to basically high school and moved to the U.S. I discovered girls and football and other things and lost interest for a while I kept everything and I didn't get back to it until when I graduated from college I was looking for a job I applied to be a foreign service officer but it takes about a year to go through the process so I needed a job in the meantime and somebody at the school of College of William Mary actually so a good relation with Great Britain because it's the only school chartered by a king and queen of England in the United States and I got a job at the Smithsonian and after that I worked there and decided I wanted to stay in museums and in 1991 I got a job at the Numismatic Collection there the National Numismatic Collection under Elvira Plain Stephanelli who was a brilliant researcher and in charge of that collection for many many years so that's the basic story that I started collecting again at that point because I was encouraged to in order to learn more about the coins and it was the start of my serious education in numismatics I guess yeah okay so yeah that was one of my questions actually was whether you still collect coins yourself whether you've got a large collection I do collect coins I began with Parthian coins I was being given a tour of the collection when I first started at Smithsonian and I noticed these ancient Greek coins that to me were very interesting to many people they seem to be very similar but and then I realized wow these you can collect these coins versus say Athenian tetragrams or something for twenty or thirty dollars a piece and you know with with my salary at a time that was what I could possibly afford and there were two thousand year old coins so I began collecting those and I branched out beyond a little bit so that I collect metals today anything from Carl Getz metals to 18th century metals commemorating victories and things of of that sort but it's also something that that's an interesting sideline because as a curator I am in charge of major collections where I would never be able to have them myself and I'm in charge of them and have trust for them so I I get to study those without actually having to own them so that's a that's a great thing yeah that must be amazing to be able to just you know find these go and look at these rarities and absolutely up close and it gives you a strange spin you know working with the Smithsonian's collections at at times I would believe that something was must be common there's two of these in the collection it must be relatively common it turns out those are two coins there are two of three known so it gives you a strange spin and then when you start to realize that and learn more over time you realize wow what a privilege it is to be able to work with such fabulous collections and have access to material that truly is you know history in your hands and and part of history in and of themselves the individual pieces are much less the types and stuff okay so just going going back to your your kind of growing up in different countries and also some of some of the research and I you've done that the book you published and just some of the coins that you've mentioned how do you think a country's culture kind of influences its coins why do why you know why why do we get so many different coins around the world what makes what makes the different sure I find that a fascinating that's one of the one of the areas that I'm very interested in is that the messages that can be gleaned from coins you know one of the major arguments for why coins became the important economic thing that they are today is not so much that there was an invention that allowed ease of trade and all that they did allow that to some extent but there was a confluence of of events with the development of the Greek police the the early city with this new organization and new identity with the spread of the idea of coinage from Lydia and this spread the Greeks quickly realized that this could be a means of mass communication that coinage was a way of spreading the information around that a you existed that you're independent and then telling albeit in a very small place and and in abbreviated form who you are and what you stand for and that that idea I think is what made coinage or money as we know it today become the standard that's spread throughout the world eventually because it is used as a calling card for a new nation even today you know a new nation springs up somewhere and even if they know that their economy is in bad shape they've had a revolution or or civil wars or whatever it's important to create money either paper or or coinage that shows that they're independent that they have the ability and when they do that they talk about themselves so if you look at money throughout the world it's one of the first impressions you'll get of a country when you do when you go in and you exchange your your currency for theirs and you can tell things if you're looking for it something that people don't do much anymore really they don't really look at the money and to see what it says but you know if you see money that has the same image of a person on it everywhere you you learn something about their government either it's a monarchy or it's a dictatorship you know if you start seeing images of different people and there's stories about oh this is so and so oh they're great artists or they're great athletes or they're great personages you know something about the country and what what they want others to see yeah and then you'll see images of of oil wells or factories or or scenes of this countryside or agriculture and you can learn something about them that way as well are they a developing nation are they dependent on certain types of exports are they you know so it's it's something that even though in especially in the united states or great britain we don't worry about the the money in the same way as far as looking at it and the messages are arguably a little less important but at the same time there are people who consider them and they mean something as you go back in time it's it's even more important now if you look at many nations monarchies especially you know okay so you've got the king and you've got the coat of arms and that happens for centuries but that's not the only story that's there because you can learn for example in great britain's coinage uh the kings of of england claimed to be the rulers of scotland ireland wales well and then france the centuries even though they never you know there was a very short period where there's a joint king you know one king so you get an idea of of the aspirations and how a nation wants to be seen mm so that's what's fascinating to me because over time you also get especially difficult times the french revolution the english civil war uh if you look at the coinage you'll see some very interesting stories told for example the you know cromwell's uh second coinage his coinage where all of a sudden you've had english on the coins for a short while under the parliament and the date and in all this and they have a very basic coat of arms because they didn't want to be associated with the royal coats of arms which were not national they were more family oriented so you have the cross of st george subtly over the irish harp so they're you know the england over that and then cromwell comes around and he returns to latin he's dressed as a roman emperor which i'm sure he never dressed as in real life yeah and you've got the the cromwell lion overlaying the coats of arms of great britain which is oh uh perhaps he's trying to do something new here yeah yeah it's fascinating isn't it and this i mean there's there must be so many of these stories and moments in history that are reflected in the collection that you have there so this is a this is probably an impossible question but is there a particular favorite story or a coin that has a story in the collection if you could pick one well it's interesting i you know i'm an american and and you'd expect me to be more interested in u.s coins and i and i am very interested in them but perhaps my most famous my the most interesting coin to me in part because it's same but in part because of its artistry is uh the petition crown so an english coin of all things uh by thomas simon and it's an amazing piece because of its its the the amazing design and how well executed it was and then the the fact that in 1660 being able to put two lines of edge lettering around the edge is is technically extremely difficult for that time and we don't do it today there are very very few coins that have that kind of uh detail on them so just the story behind that is something that's very fascinating to me yeah well you aside from being a masterpiece yeah absolutely okay that's that's um i guess that's that's nice to know is you know obviously i'm speaking to you from england so it's nice to know that our coinage kind of the history of the coinage i guess has influence around the world or is at least noted around the world so would you would you say i mean do you have many british coins in the collection then is it a national collection it is an international international collection it was formed with the idea of creating a record of numismatic history from a to z originally so uh back in the 1920s the american numismatic association um consciously made a decision to start a collection and the way they began it was to uh basically begin purchasing world mint sets of the time current mint sets okay and so that was actually pretty fortuitous i mean uh one of the sets we got was an australian set of you know 1930 uh one with the the penny that's now extraordinarily rare and special so the time was good and we had a core collection that was donated by a member and that became the the seed which started the collection we have today and today we have approximately 275,000 objects in the collection ranging from stocks and bonds to coins tokens paper money of course and metals so it's quite a wide-ranging collection we're the focus on us material but the but it ranges way well beyond that we have something like 12,000 ancient greek and roman coins and things like that so it's quite diverse yeah and is the collection still growing do you still get uh coins coming in absolutely we're we're today we're we're due to receive a collection a famous collection actually of about a thousand items of washingtonia so tokens and metals uh celebrating george washington the collection that was actually formed by the the most famous early uh collector or historian of washington material uh william spawn baker and his collection was recently purchased uh on a in a sale and uh it's been donated to us so it's something i'm really looking forward to because there's some amazing pieces in there yeah okay so what's the process once you get those coins you know once they arrive if they're coming today what's the the kind of process you go through did are they all digitally recorded well in this case since most of them but not all of them came from an auction we have the auction records so we printed out the records and we will check in the pieces immediately you know we'll go through the boxes and check everything off make sure that we know what we have and then it matches what we're we're supposed to receive once we do that we'll begin a process which will take a couple months of uh photographing everything and entering them into the database and make them available online this is one of the things we've worked on so in the last six or seven years we've been increasingly putting more and more of the collection online so it's available to researchers and so that'll be our project over the next couple months not the only one but a primary project yeah excellent that's quite exciting then when is that quite a regular thing for for that for kind of collections like that or is this unique this is pretty unique we we've had a few like this in the past this is a very special one it's uh you know we do get donations on a regular basis but most of them are of the order you know grand grand dad died and and we don't know what to do with his points or uh more interestingly you know they form a collection and they want to donate it because it's specialized in certain areas or even uh you know we have counterfeits being sent to us on a regular basis because we will take them get them off the market and use them in our uh educational programming so that our counterfeit class that kind of thing can use material of that sort yeah okay fantastic so when you're not receiving these kind of big donations what what would you say your kind of typical day is that museum well we are we have been focused for the last uh decade or so on cataloging the collection uh digitally so we have uh as I said about 270,000 items probably about 120 to 140,000 of them are what I would call the core collection non duplicates uh material that that is of the right quality everything else and so we are working hard to get all of that fully cataloged in a digital format with photographs and all this we've we've managed to do uh about 40,000 of them now and hopefully we will be done in the next five or six years who we'll see yeah but it's a process it's something that takes quite a lot of time so that's what uh two out of the three people on the staff other than myself spend most of their time doing and then we have you know about a quarter of my time has spent working with that off and on and then I spend a lot of time preparing for new exhibits and doing research and then unfortunately it's like being a fighter pilot you get to the level where you have to do more administration and and all that so I'm taken away by a lot of administration and being in meetings and all that yes but I do occasionally get to work on some amazing things like this collection that will be coming in today yeah fantastic okay so I mean what else does the the museum offer we obviously we can go to the website and see thousands of the coins that are being digitized um what else does the the museum and the and the ANA kind of offer for the coin collectors yeah uh and that's one of the things that's changed significantly over the last uh seven or eight years uh we've been moving more and more into the digital world so that uh today we now have three virtual tours of the exhibits including one that's an an older exhibit on world war one uh where you can actually walk through in your computer and see the exhibit and then what's different is it's not just that you see the cases and all this you can actually go up to the cases and click on them and see the individual coins uh averse and reverse blown up on your screen so it's actually in some ways better than being there in person I mean there's still not quite it's not quite the same as seeing it in person but uh being able to see a coin blown up five or six times or more its actual size means that for somebody like myself where my near vision is getting worse uh it allows me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to see in person because they're too small now if you were at a transportation museum with a giant train or something it's not as important but for numismatic uh museums it's truly important and we've made some big strides with that and in fact we just got an award from the Numismatic Literary Guild in the United States for the best non-trade website this year just a few weeks ago uh based on our history of money exhibit where you can see all of these items yeah so we offer that we also one of the major things that the ANA has is the world's largest lending library for numismatic items uh our library is a numismatic library obviously it has uh over a hundred thousand books peer articles catalogs and we are a lending institution so if you are a member of the ANA uh you can borrow the items it's a little more difficult uh abroad uh simply because of mailing costs but for the cost of shipping you can get you can borrow most of the items in our collection which is pretty amazing yeah that is I didn't realize that that's great and also um you do quite a lot of learning don't you e-learning and yes that kind of thing we we we have an e-learning program uh that is expanded vastly as with most other organizations over COVID so unfortunately our summer seminar which was an in-person uh program every summer for two weeks we couldn't do for the last two years and we've we will be doing our best to restart it in this coming year but uh we began a series of e-learning programs using zoom and webinar features that uh have been very successful we've had something like 6 000 separate users uh and we've we've done including uh creating videos with them uh something like uh 80 or 90 of the well I don't know the number exactly but we've done dozens of them that are recorded now on our website so there's a lot of material that's available uh and ranges from the basics of coin collecting 101 sort of things to uh advanced talks on medieval numismatics or uh introductions to various series and counterfeiting you know detecting counterfeits and uh even some grading portions yeah fantastic so for for people outside the us there's still you know there's still plenty that they can get involved with absolutely because all of this is is available online so uh some of it is uh based on you need to be a member uh and we've got about 20 a little over 28 000 members right now uh but much of it is also available for free you can go on the website and see quite a bit of material including uh a lot of uh youth-based information about coinage that is available for free and we have other programs that are more traditional like a uh correspondence program for numismatics where you can learn the basics about how to begin collecting and and counterfeit detection and things like that where you would sign in online but you would actually get a hard copy of a book that you would then do testing in and turn the results in yeah we have some really great programs for our YNs our young numismatists including coins for A's so if you get a certain number of A's in any given uh grading period you can actually win coins and uh we have a very active program with uh the youth where they can do certain projects as members and as they do them they earn what we call YN dollars and those dollars can be traded in at monthly auctions or in an annual auction which we just had uh two weeks ago where we had uh something like 70 I believe uh YNs signed up and they were using their dollars so not real money but money that they could use to purchase items that are collectible in an auction so it's quite a lot of fun they enjoy it excellent okay and would you say um just looking over the the past two years I think from certainly from looking at the US from here the US coin market or just just um the hobby seems to be really big in the US um yeah I'm just wondering how you know how has it been affected by COVID do you think benefited from some some things it's it definitely has um the market has gotten very hot due to COVID I guess uh there's a few things you know COVID obviously has been very bad in many ways and hurt a huge number of people but when it comes to the people that that had the types of jobs where they could work from home and all that it there was a lot of I mean my theory is basically they people weren't able to go out to uh eat or go to entertainment and everything else they were accumulating money with little to do with it and and one of the things we found at the museum is you know the e-learning attendance shot up you know we had in our first summer seminar uh period when we couldn't run it we ran a series of e-learning classes one or two hours long and we had 500 people signing up and 375 400 people attending these zoom sessions which was awesome yeah and I think it worked that way with the market too because it wasn't just coins it was across the board there was a lot of money that started moving into the e-universe or whatever you want to call it um and so prices for coins went up any dealers any coin dealers that had an internet presence saw a big bump and which is good it kept the hobby going uh what's been interesting that's that's sort of an aberration or it is an aberration is that we've had a lot of big coins the famous very rare coins with the high dollar values have exchanged hands um either through public or private auction and there's been a few of them that have changed hands several times which is not normal you know normally what happens is somebody gets their 1804 dollar and it disappears for five years ten years because they've got it in their collection and these are collectors that want to have this yeah instead here we've had some record prices where a coin some of these coins have sold and then three months later they're on the market again and I've heard various theories but apparently some of this may be almost like gambling the the excitement of the auction and purchasing something and then seeing if they could actually make more money at it soon afterwards as opposed to the traditional collector who wants to have this as part of their collection so it's been an interesting ride seeing however everything's been moving yeah and just just think about auctions do you um does the museum have any budget to acquire coins at auction or do you rely just on donations 99% of our collection has been based on donations we we don't have any significant budget for purchases I mean I can I have a budget that is very small you know a couple thousand dollars that I can use to fill out exhibits when we do a new exhibit we need you know a few coins here and there but we don't have the kind of money where you know oh there's a rare colonial us coin it's going at auction for $60,000 no we don't have that kind of money and very rarely have we ever been able to purchase major items but we've been fortunate in that we've had I mean we have a world-class collection especially in certain areas you know our US paper money is spectacular and that's based on mostly but not exclusively one major collection and then we have other things you know we've had things donated over the years that have been pretty impressive you know a decade drama Syracuse things of that sort that yeah dedicated members and people who want to preserve the collections have trusted us so we've managed to accumulate some pretty nice material yeah fantastic okay and just just one last question for you Doug um if someone's just starting out collecting what advice what tips would you give them because sometimes you can look at the subject say Greek coinage or even Roman coinage and it just seems so vast and so complex it can be quite um can be a little bit apprehensive about kind of jumping in so what tips would you give to a newcomer to start learning well first off read about them learn something about them um spend some time to get an idea of of what it is you like because more than anything else if you're going to get I mean this is a hobby uh and people go into it for a lot of different reasons you can go into it to make money well that's one way you can also do it you know if you're doing it as a hobby you need to figure out what it is that you're interested in and then start looking around and see um okay you're interested in Roman emperors of the early period so the the 12 seizures let's say well start looking at the coin see what's available and you find that oh well they're available in bronze silver gold what kind of budget do you have what are you comfortable with with that and then then try to start purchasing them but do it in a disciplined way uh how much money do you have don't go above your budget get the best pieces you can for what it is you know within your range but more than anything else make sure that you're interested in them and stay disciplined it's too easy to start uh just buying things across the board if you aren't interested in a huge amount of uh you know different subject areas and all that there are ways of collecting that can encompass that one of my good friends was creating a collection based on the major um civilizations of the world so he would he would get an he got an Athenian tetradram because of Athens and its cultural and you know cultural and economic importance and all that and then he would get a Chinese coin that was representative of the first emperor uh and he did that where he had coins you know if you looked at the question without having understanding what he was doing it did have a purpose and did have a theme to it but it would seem very scattered because it had pieces from all over the place so you know he would have something from the Italian Renaissance uh all this kind of thing um but there's many many ways of collecting coins so I think you have to one of the axioms we use in the US is buy the book before the coin uh do a little bit of research ahead of time and I've seen people that have had tremendous joy out of their collections in a huge number of different areas you know I know somebody who collects elephants on coins throughout history so yeah every coin that he can find that has an elephant on it is part of his collection yeah uh I know somebody who's collected based on bridges because he's fascinated by bridges and transportation and so you know collections from the collection ranges from Roman era all the way up to the modern day and and features coins from all over the world people metals I mean all sorts of different things yeah fantastic okay well that's brilliant thanks so much for your time and um we're definitely gonna I'm definitely gonna check out a lot of the website and one day perhaps I can come over and see the museum in person that would be good absolutely just make sure we do it ahead of time so I can give you a special tour it'd be fantastic yeah that's the definite then yeah as soon as soon as we're allowed to travel we'll be there but yeah thanks so much for your time um thanks for asking answering all the questions and being involved in the festival of coins have a great day with the the donation that's coming in I hope it's it's a really interesting day for you thank you very much and thank you for the privilege of uh being able to uh participate in this it's a great program so I I hope everything's going very well and have a great day thank you thanks Doug speak soon don't miss the festival showcase for more supporters of the festival of coins