USA Coin Album: Feeling "Board"?

There’s a time when most coin collectors bump into a wall in their hobby. This can be prompted by the high cost of the items they’re seeking, but it also can result from completing a certain coin series. If the series is a particular favorite, the temptation exists to start a second set, perhaps one in a different grade range. I’ve done this many times. Years ago I had complete or nearly complete sets of all the popular 20th Century USA coin series from cents through dollars. These coins graded AU-50 to 58 for the scarcer issues and MS-64 and higher for the later dates. A series such as Mercury dimes or Walking Liberty halves is so compelling, however, that I found myself wanting to put together duplicate sets grading anywhere from VG-10 to VF-30. It proved nearly as challenging to match all these coins for color and contrast, but in time I achieved this goal for all series from the Barber coins of 1892 up through the end of silver coinage in 1964. Housed in deluxe coin albums, they made for very attractive presentations.

By the time my duplicate sets were completed, I’d already sold the higher grade collections to fund some other area of numismatic interest. My circulated sets, however, still survive. As the coins were carefully selected for their appearance, they look far better than the random assortments I acquired in my early hobby days of collecting from circulation. Still, the collecting bug persisted, and the solution to wanting an additional set of Lincoln cents or Buffalo nickels was provided by yet another area of hobby interest.

Since about 1980 I’ve been collecting vintage coin boards of the 1930s and ‘40s. These were the precursors to the folders still being used today. Instead of several small pages folded over one another, coin boards consisted of a single panel measuring 11” wide by 14” high. The first coin board was created in 1934 by Joseph Kent Post, Sr., an engineer for the Kimberly-Clark paper products company in Neenah, Wisconsin. A coin collector himself, he used his engineering know-how to devise the coin board as a means of popularizing the hobby, which up to that point had been rather exclusive. Since Kimberly-Clark had cut back on his pay and hours during the Great Depression, it also promised a nice supplement to his family’s income.

Post contracted with Whitman Publishing Company in nearby Racine to manufacture his boards. Whitman was then a producer of puzzles, games and other paper novelties, and it had the necessary tooling to mass produce coin boards. By the end of 1935 Post had sold the rights to his invention to Whitman, which then assigned Dick Yeo (pen name R. S. Yeoman) to oversee its marketing and expansion. The Whitman line of coin boards for all popular series became an immediate success, and it was marketed in general retail stores around the country, thus exposing thousands of Americans to the previously obscure hobby of collecting coins. Six additional publishers had joined the coin board business by 1939, and the hobby grew in leaps and bounds for decades afterward.

Coin boards began giving way to folders in 1939 when a new publisher, the Daniel Stamp Company (now known as DANSCO) introduced a coin series holder consisting of two smaller boards folded into book form. This proved much more convenient than the large, single-panel boards, and Whitman soon devised its own, even smaller folders comprised of three overlapping boards. The last large format boards were printed around 1948 by Joseph Oberwise in Los Angeles, and the original coin boards passed into history. Today, they are highly collectable. (Disclaimer: I maintain a modest sideline trade in these vintage boards).

After completing my coin album sets, I began assembling several coin series within coin boards to illustrate in my 2007 book Coin Collecting Boards of the 1930s and 1940s. As often happens when experimenting with coin holders, I soon became hooked on replicating most of my circulated sets in coin board form. I now have several sets of Lincoln cents in vintage coin boards, as well as single sets of Liberty and Buffalo nickels, Barber and Mercury dimes and Standing Liberty and Washington quarters (the openings run out at 1943, however). I’d just started to assemble board sets of Barber quarters and halves when the advancing price of silver put a halt to this fun.

Despite their rarity, vintage coin boards can be acquired at little expense in Fine or so. Whitman boards for cents through dimes typically cost about $15 in this grade, while the boards for quarters and halves are quite a bit scarcer and start at around $25. Though the dried adhesive visible within the openings may deter some collectors, my experience has been that its reactive quality has been neutralized by age, and there's little risk to circulated coins beyond toning at their rims. When the completed boards are framed under glass, the coins enjoy a reasonable level of protection. Old boards fit standard size 11”x14” picture frames, and they make for a great wall display.

David W. Lange's column, “USA Coin Album,” appears monthly in The Numismatist, the official publication of the American Numismatic Association.