Harv wrote:

"Phil Barnhart" wrote in message
om...
Mmm - lets say you know nothing of coins and get several as part of an
estate. HOW are you going to educate yourself? Library references in
most towns are woefully out of date and inadequate. Do a Google
search on coin collecting (make it fair - pick a subject you know
NOTHING about collecting, do a search, and give yourself a half-hour -
could you now determine the value of a particular item? Nope). So
what are ya going to do. What would a typical non-collector do?
Since numismatics is one of the few areas without independent
appraisers, you take your coins to the local dealer . . . .

What else would someone do? Reasonably?

Find or make a friend who is an experienced collector, sit down with him and
his collection and your stuff and start asking questions. How does anyone
learn about anything? They have a teacher or a mentor. Were you born knowing
how to drive or how to balance a checkbook or ride a bicycle or use a
computer? I've been using computers since the late 1970s and still don't
pretend to know everything, and still ask questions of friends who
specialize in certain areas in which my knowledge is lacking. Of course I
don't NEED to know everything there is to know. I don't NEED to know how to
program in assembly language. If you're trying to sell coins, you don't NEED
to know the mechanics of how a coin press works..

You can only take "self taught" to a certain limit, and then you have to
seek the advice of others with more experience and just start asking a lot
of questions. There's only so much you get from buying a pile of coin books
and trying to teach yourself what it all means.

Unfortunately, they don't give college courses in Numismatics, but if there
really are tens of millions of collectors in the US, they probably should..
If they did, all those ripoff teevee coin selling shows would soon go away
as people learned what a scam they are. Dealers wouldn't rub their hands
with glee like Mr. Burns when they fleece an uneducated seller out of a
valuable coin for pennies on the dollar.

It's like anything else in life. If you wanna play the game, you have to
learn the rules.. and the best way to learn the rules are from someone else
who already knows them..

Harv

That's the same opinion I would have offered. If you have come into a
collection of something that you believe may be valuable and want to
sell it, get someone you can confide in to help you get advice as to the
best place to sell it--if you must. Unless you have to have cash in
your hands by Tuesday, you should have plenty of time to explore the
possibilities. I have little sympathies for the person, elderly or not,
who unloads inherited valuables or collectibles just because he doesn't
know anything about their true worth and won't take the time to find
out. Ironically, I would like to leave my coin collection to the
relative who is the most well off and would be the least likely to run
out and unload it the next day.

Bruce