CWL Coins We Love: A Fond Farewell I came to DLRC in July 2006 from a large, wholesale-based coin company in an attempt to move closer to family. While I had been in the coin business for several years full-time, I had worked as a dealer on the side for over a decade beforehand. Upon my arrival,
Perfection Collection Seated Liberty Half Dollar Proofs & the Perfection Collection Proof coins from the mid-19thcentury are among the most under-appreciated issues in numismatics. Proof issues of all denominations were minted sporadically until 1858, when it is generally believed that the sale of proof sets to individual collectors at a small premium began under Mint Director J.R. Snowden. With this
coins we love Coins We Love: Thanksgiving Edition! This week’s CWL comes to you a day earlier than normal as our offices will be closed Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday. We appreciate your understanding and encourage you to reach out to us via email at coins@davidlawrence.com if we can be of assistance during
coins we love Coins We Love: A New Wave of Collectors First of all, thank you to everyone who wrote back messages of all types and lengths regarding last week’s message. It’s always a please to hear from the readers and it makes my midnight ramblings a little easier to write the next week. Last week was supposed to
coins we love Coins We Love: November News! This past weekend was absolutely beautiful and with the weather in the 80s the bike paths were active and the boardwalk in Virginia Beach had plenty of folks getting some socially distanced exercise. Today the rain has come in and begins the Fall period that we’d expect for November.
DLRC Auction The 1909-S VDB Lincoln Cent For almost 100 years of American history, it was illegal to put a real person on a coin. When the first coins were issued some people suggested putting George Washington on them, but he protested, arguing that having the president’s image on coinage would be too similar to monarchal
Pan-Pac Panama-Pacific Commemoratives 1915 was an exciting year for the United States. The Panama Pacific International Exposition was held in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, a project begun back in the 1880s by French engineers and finally finished by the US in 1914. For the time, the grandeur
Morgan Dollar Registry Sets If you’ve been collecting coins for even just a couple months, chances are that you’ve already seen how immensely popular the Morgan dollar series is. Minted from 1878 to 1921, commonly in massive numbers, thousands of Morgan dollars were stashed in bank vaults for decades before being released
DLRC News How COVID Has Changed DLRC At DLRC, we have a slightly different view than most businesses when we look outside our windows. We don’t have a storefront, nor do we deal with the general public in person, so we often sit here in a state of pandemic, wondering “what’s next?” It’s a
coins we love Coins We Love: Current Market Report We've added another week to the ticker of time being spent in Virginia Beach and not elsewhere on the coin circuit. A few shows have popped up in different areas in recent weeks and attendance (collector and dealer-wise) has apparently been off the charts when compared to recent
DLRC Auction The 1897 Proof Set The 1897 proof set was issued at an interesting time for the hobby, and its relative scarcity is not fully appreciated by collectors today. By many accounts 1897 was a slow year for numismatics. In December 1896, after a period of diminished activity, The Numismatist and the American Numismatic Association
Caption Contest A Cartful of Captions Thanks everyone for submitting captions for our latest DLRC office image caption contest! While the DLRC staff has yet to decide on a winner, we wanted to share some of the hilarious responses we received from our friends across the nation! Readers of our weekly Coins We Love email were
CWL Coins We Love: Laundry Week at DLRC We’ve had a particularly productive week at DLRC. Early in the week we received a hefty number of packages and we were able to get those turned around quickly. We purchased what was fitting for DLRC, took on consignment what would do better via an auction route, and processed
DLRC Auction The 1916-D Mercury Dime Throughout the first decade of the 1900s there was a strong push to redesign the nation’s coinage, which many believed to inadequately represent the nation. In part due to the President Theodore Roosevelt's involvement in selecting artists, the redesigns of the double eagle, gold eagle, half eagle
DLRC Auction The 1888 $3 Gold The $3 gold piece was first minted in 1854, prompted by the price of stamps. At the time, a single first class stamp cost three cents, so purchasing a sheet of 100 stamps cost $3. The idea was to make it easier to pay for this with exact change; the
coins we love Coins We Love: Visit the ANA Museum! Interestingly, I had a lot of feedback from readers this past week regarding my horse-riding experience. I never realized that there was such a cross-over between coin collectors and horses, but apparently it’s quite prevalent. Another amusing cross-over that is more specific to coin dealers, is the prominence of
So-Called Dollars Lesher's "So-Called" Dollars This week we are excited to offer an intriguing new collection – the Broad Bay Collection of So-Called Dollars [https://www.davidlawrence.com/en-us?collectionIds=302103]. "So-Called Dollars" are medals from the 1800s and 1900s roughly the size of a silver dollar that were commonly struck to commemorate historic
DLRC Auction The 1804 $10 Gold Eagle The most famous 1804 coin may be the silver dollar, but it wasn’t the only interesting piece bearing this date. 1804 was the last year of the Draped Bust $10 gold eagle, a denomination that wasn’t minted again until 1838. It’s believed that somewhere between 2,500
CWL Coins We Love: Home Improvement My apologies for last week’s CWL message! My family and I had just returned from a socially-distanced vacation and I've been playing a bit of catch up around the office. Thursday went by like a speedboat and Friday…well it was busy, and that’s always a
DLRC Press View the Entire DLRC Press Catalog Online! We are often asked about the books that we published at the DLRC Press that were once available on our website. Thanks to the Internet Archive [https://archive.org/], a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that hosts a free digital academic library, we are now able to offer our entire
CWL Coins We Love: Mid-September Mayhem This week has gotten ahead of us a bit and unfortunately we do not have a lengthy message to share in this week's CWL. For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, we promise to double up next week and hopefully make it twice as interesting!
coins we love Coins We Love: Short Week Specials We hope that the Labor Day weekend was a nice conclusion of summer for each of you. The shortened week at DLRC always creates an atmosphere of organized chaos upon our return and this time was no different. While Tuesday was full of coins flying all over the office, it
DLRC News Sold! $10k+ Coins Heat Up! We talk with customers every day about our inventory, their collections, coins in auction etc. and one common question that typically comes up is “What’s hot right now?” Because we sell a broad range of series and grade levels, this is often a difficult question to answer. When we
CWL Coins We Love: Happy Labor Day This week has been a nice change of pace for us as things seemed to just move a bit smoother. We somewhat expected that going into a holiday weekend, but you never know for sure until it arrives. As usual, the auction is plugging along, there are packages flying in
JAJ Just Ask John: More nuTilt Questions We’ve received quite a bit of feedback in the past week regarding our trial release of nuTilt imaging. It’s truly been rather exciting for us here at DLRC. While we released it to “test” the project before a full release, it was picked up and broadcast by a