What is the “Best 20”, anyhow???
I completely understand your puzzlement and wonder — and I’ll be only too happy to explain:
You send me $25. I go to bank, “buy plenty wampum”, to quote Stan Freberg, meaning I get a $25 box of U.S. in-circulation business-strike pennies from the bank, bring the box home with YOUR name on it, and begin plundering the box on your behalf.
Why? For money?
Money. Haw, haw!
Haven’t you been paying attention the past few millenia? At the end of every road, EVERY road, there’s a wooden kimono, a cement overcoat, a Cocoon of The Very Rich & the Very Poor.
There’s no point accumulating things here, or anywhere else, for that matter — and you really should cultivate the skill of farming when you need gold coins to buy a better class of armor or you need to craft up a teleport Chaos Armor, which of course means “Enigma”.
There is no other solution, and if you’ve been keeping up with the factoids in this time zone, you’d know what comes next.
What comes next are our “CQR Stations” — booths in the gallery where you can come in and run a FREE SuperBeacon Induction for the price of a cold drink, and run an Orb FREE on our Orb-Running Station computer, which some kind soul will surely donate.
Eventually, there will be crowds waiting to get training in the movements, on the SuperBeacon and in the Orbs, on guitar, on watercolor and acrylics, charcoals, graphite and sculpture, ceramics, theater arts, dance and videogame design.
That’s the general offering base of the College of Coinology that I have in mind. My vision is of a far-distant future, where the name “trump” is long-forgotten, and the miseries of Amerikan racism have melded into a universally tea-colored population that no longer understands what “racism” might have been about, and no longer has a reason to care, if it ever did have.
Um, where was I??? Oh, yeah — you send me $25 bucks and I buy a box of pennies and search them on your behalf, to test your Luck Power.
I pluck out 20 choice specimens — the first 20 are then packaged in flips, upon which I write a description of the coin, date and mintmark, and any errors I’ve noticed on them, which in this case will be every single one of those coins I’m pulling out of there.
They are ALL going to be Mint Errors of one kind or another, and if it isn’t spectacular enough, it doesn’t get chosen for the flipping stage. Only those pennies that are worthy of spending an extra quarter on go into the flips, period.
No slightly under-the-wire coins go into flips, not on my watch, not in my back yard. You get only those coins that I would be happy to try to sell my own self. No wasted time or effort, all goodies, all worth ‘way more than a penny!
By the way, ” — ‘way more — ” is an adaptation and shortening of the phrase “Away More”, which came from shipbuilding and seafaring days of the 15th – 18th centuries, and it was shortened from “Far and away more”, a phrase common in Welsh and English sailors’ circles, banking and early insurance — Lloyd’s of London being the historic “first”.
Lessee — $25 bucks, $25 dollars, what becomes of your twenty-five dol — Oh, I remember now!
I wrap the “20 Best” of the 2500 pennies I’ve just searched, and then I arrange them in the same sequence in which they showed up on my workbench, into a coin-safe plastic page that goes neatly into a three-ring binder, and I ship that page to you.
Keep in mind that all 20 coins are clearly identified, graded and mint-errors spelled out for you, plus you get the plastic page and the flips — this works out to much more than your initial $25, as you’ve already surmised.
In addition, I will send you more goodies from your bank-box, if you like, at $10 per page of 20 — I don’t identify these — it’s up to you to do it. If you want identified, graded & priced, it’s $20 per page.
You can elect to get your additional goodies, those not quite good enough for flips plus those that just didn’t make it into the official count, packed in tubes, for which I charge $2 per labeled tube of 50 coins — I don’t ship these in paper wrappers, because you’ll want to USE them and dole them out one by one to your customers.
Paper wrappers are a mess, if you’re using the coins. Plastic tubes are better — you can open them and close them easily — and the ones I get and use are the very best available, the ones that are the easiest to use and the easiest to keep track of when the chips or coins are down, meaning you’re looking for a specific RAW coin.
Flips can and should be stored in file boxes — I prefer the red ones, myself — makes ’em easy to see in a back seat or trunk, when you’re doing a lot of coin shows, which we used to do, back when we were young, in our fifties and sixties.
Why am I doing this, offering to create sheets of error coins from your bank box, and most of all, why am I doing this below cost?
As I said many times before, the money doesn’t matter — you can’t take it past the wooden box, no matter how hard you try, and old habits don’t die when your body does, as the story of my Uncle Harvey illustrates so clearly:
My Aunt Harriet decided to have a seance only a few days after the funeral. She invited a number of his co-workers at the delicatessen where he had worked as a waiter for over 50 years, since he came over from Russia back in 1905.
So at the seance, his voice was so faint, we could hardly hear him.
Finally, Aunt Harriet and Aunt Martha both asked him to speak up and he replied that he was speaking up, as loudly as he could.
“I still can’t hear you very well,” Aunt Martha insisted. “Can’t you come any closer to us?”
“No, I can’t,” Uncle Harvey said sadly, “that’s not my table.”
So you send $25, I send a plastic page full of notated pennies, and if you want more, I send more — $10 per page for unwritten flips, $20 per page for written & attributed flips.
I send rolls of YOUR Mint Errors & Lesser Mint Errors & Very Goddam Minor Mint Errors That Still Could Sell In Spite of That Errors in a plastic tube that costs me a buck & change, for which you pay a flat $2 plus postage, which usually works out to less than a thousand dollars, if you don’t want it to arrive anytime soon.
I asked the postal clerk why it only took two days for the Pony Express to get the mail from here to Los Angeles, and now it takes five days, sometimes six, to get there. Why is that?
She said, “Well, those horses are a lot older, now.”
By golly, she’s right.
So in my searches, I look for, and capture on your behalf, the following things:
RAINBOW — These are potentially “5-Star” Lucky Pieces, but they have to be totally iridescent and radiant, almost self-illuminated, to qualify as 5-Star — mostly they’re “Double Lucky” or “Lucky” Rainbow Pennies.
ERROR — These will mostly be the common errors, but they’ll be quite noticeable, if they qualify for flipping, and will include off-center, anneal error “rhino skin”, struck-thru grease, counter-clashes of any kind, DDOs and DDRs if any show up, Doubled Ear, Doubled Date, all the possible errors that might appear.
All the coins will be VINTAGE, meaning you get coins up to Year 2000, and most of them will be as early as I can find, with as good an error as will show up in your bank box.
GEM coins, those stunning examples of a coin, regardless of date or mintmark or errors, will be included if they are spectacular enough to qualify. If not, you’ll find them in the plastic tubes.
Only the Best of the Best go into flips.
Experientially, here’s the breakdown:
- RAINBOW, DDO, DDR, ROTATED REVERSE — 5-Star Lucky
- VINTAGE “WHEATIE” ERROR — OFF-CENTER, CLASH, MDO — Quad Lucky
- HIGH-GRADE “MEMORIAL” ERRORS — Triple Lucky
- ANTIQUE “WHEATIES” — 100 YEARS OLD — Double Lucky
- COMMON “WHEATIES” or “MEMS” — Lucky
That’s the mainspring that will drive this coin-spewing machine. Remember that the payoff is to find those special coins that can be marked up a LOT, but at the same time farming for those coins that can be sold a dollar at a time.
If you get a 3,000 coin bag of WHEATIES, you can sell them for $2 a pop as “Double Lucky Lincoln Wheat-Backed Pennies”, which yields you 3,000 x $2 — that’s $6,000 at full retail, if I calculate correctly. That’s not what you’ll actually get out of it, because you’ll make deals, you’ll sell some for $20 and some you won’t be able to move at all, unless you give them away when you sell something else, which isn’t a bad plan in itself.
“May I show you the Luckiest Penny Ever?” you ask a passerby. “It’s a 100 Year Old “Lucky Lincoln” Wheat-Backed Penny, and I’m only asking a dollar for it. It makes a great gift.
“Would you like your Lucky Lincoln Penny in an Acrylic Capsule to keep it safe and good looking?”
Just as you’d play Harry Belafonte’s “Back to Back and Belly to Belly Zombie Jamboree” when selling hot sauces, you’ll want to play “Hittin’ the Streets, Lookin’ for the Rainbow” when doing a Coinology Street Hustle.
That’s the same as when Christians witness, except you’re giving something rather than taking something away.
- It’s not what you take with you — it’s what you leave behind.
- It’s not what you do — it’s the company you keep.
- It’s not how you feel — it’s how you look.
Get out there and hustle some coins, boys & girls!!! It’s time to make a buck!!!
See You At The Top!!!
gorby