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Coin Board News – For Collectors of Antique Coin Boards

By David Lange – www.coincollectingboards.net

MARKET ACTIVITY

After the amazing developments during the last quarter of 2010, the new year has started out relatively quiet. The seller on eBay who has been offering partial sets of pennies in Lincoln Printing Company boards for many months is still attempting to sell them at fixed prices to little effect. These boards are not truly rare, but they are relatively scarce compared to the more familiar Whitman and Oberwise boards. Nevertheless, it appears that the prices are enough to discourage persons interested solely in the boards.

Additional offerings of coin boards have been very few, and nothing of quality has been seen. There were some good buys in lower grade boards, but these don’t appeal to serious collectors. I rarely buy them at any price, unless a rare or new variety appears. My own sales from the last list were excellent, with continued interest shown in the early coin folder selections, too. Despite this promising start, list number 118 is solely coin boards, but the selection of these is quite nice. I’ll be offering more folders from time to time.

One customer reported his good fortune at finding a stack of pristine Whitman First Edition boards from a Chicago antique dealer. These were vendor stamped for R. Thomas at 163 N. Dearborn in that city. This prompted additional correspondence between us and some research on my part. I discovered advertisements for this coin dealer in The Numismatic Scrapbook Magazine dating from the late 1930s. It appears that this stack of Near Mint boards was remaindered stock that never sold and somehow survived intact for more than 70 years.

The only other highlight from this first quarter was my purchase and subsequent sale of two extremely rare publisher-bound albums of Colonial Coin & Stamp Company boards. These were in the same style of brown, leatherette binders illustrated on pages 118 and 126 of my book. Both featured very clean boards but rather worn binders, and Volume II was missing the two commemorative half dollar boards it should have held. These were evidently removed at some point, as the boards are indeed removable with a bit of effort. In addition to the pair in my own collection, this brings the total population of these very rare binders to just two pair!

BOOK UPDATES

Collector Christopher Buck related to me his discovery of a Whitman board W25¢C1d in which the underlying Standing Liberty Quarter illustration may be both seen and felt underneath the pasteover strip containing the title alone. This clearly confirms my original conclusion that the pasteover was intended by the publisher to cover the illustrations. Chris also found a Lincoln Printing Company board on which the face of L1¢Bi was erroneously mated to the back paper of L1¢Ab. Because this was a random error, it will not be assigned a Lange number. New additions to my book this quarter include several minor Oberwise back paper varieties: O10¢Be, O10¢Bw and O25¢Aj.

AND IN OTHER NEWS…

There’s still no word on how the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is going to use the group of coin boards I sold it a few months back, but some sort of exhibit is in preparation. I’ll pass along whatever I can learn. Hey, they’re not Archie Bunker’s chair or Fonzie’s leather jacket, but coin boards are part of our American heritage, too.

ANNUAL UPDATES

Sharp-eyed readers spotted a few minor typos in the table of values sent out last time with the 2011 Check List & Value Guide. For example, W1¢C1d in F should read $55 instead of $5. The others are similarly obvious when the published figures are compared with adjacent ones, and these will all be fixed for the next edition in 2012. If you’re uncertain about any figures, just drop me a line.

David W. Lange POB 110022 Lakewood Ranch, FL 34211 941-586-8670

www.coincollectingboards.net

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