"People think of coin collections as money, " a member of the Numismatic Club explained.
The American Numismatic Association reports that its membership has declined slightly in recent years from about 32, 000 to 27, 000.
The New York Numismatic Club was founded in December 1908, and its members meet once a month for dinner.
Money handlers would bite down on coins to test their authenticity, said David W. Lange of Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.
Archaeologists who specialise in numismatics criticise their archaeological brethren because numismatic items are almost never published, properly excavated or recorded.
At the Numismatic Club dinner, news of a theft at the New York International Numismatic Convention, held in January, spread quickly.
The Numismatic Club dinner concluded with a lively show-and-tell where members laid out some of their rarest and most interesting coins.
After everyone had spoken, the collectors drifted around the room and examined the coins more closely, offering admiration, praise and numismatic advice.
She campaigned against the sale and the chastened museum handed over the collection intact to the American Numismatic Society for a nominal sum.
In 2003, her children brought it to the American Numismatic Association's World Fair of Money, where the other four Liberty nickels were on display.
"Basically a coin with a story and a rarity will trump everything else, " Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Finally, they brought the coin to the 2003 American Numismatic Association World's Fair of Money in Baltimore, where the four surviving 1913 Liberty nickels were being exhibited.
The five coins' existence wasn't known until Mr. Brown offered them for sale at the American Numismatic Association Convention in Chicago in 1920, beyond the statute of limitations.
Although he's on the dollar bill now and on the quarter, "Washington would probably object, " says Douglas Mudd, curator of the museum at the American Numismatic Association in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"People gripe and moan about the penny, but they still want to keep it, " says Richard Doty, senior curator of the Numismatic Collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
It is difficult to say how many licensed coin dealers are telling their customers they don't have what they need, but earlier this year, Ute Wartenberg-Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, said she was asked by an investor how one could buy 10, 000 coins (they are sold in ounce quantities and three fractional versions below that, at a price that is slightly above market value).
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