Q. David Bowers
In the years since 1960, more has appeared in print in numismatic periodicals concerning Morgan and Peace dollars than about all silver denominations combined. Silver dollars have gone from the realm of the collector to the brokerage houses of New York City. At one time, bid and ask prices for 1881-S silver dollars were advertised on a daily basis in The Wall Street Journal! Bags of 1,000 worn silver dollars (by now. thoroughly sorted through to remove anything numismatically desirable) are still traded as a commodity. I wonder if anyone ever looks in the bags. I am reminded of a long-ago audit at the San Francisco Mint (chronicled elsewhere in this book), when some "silver dollars" bagged at the mint years earlier turned out to be-would you believe-iron washers?
While I personally prefer reading about numismatic history to reading about silver dollar investment predictions, there is not the slightest doubt that tens of thousands or even more owners of Morgan and Peace dollars are in it for potential profit. Take away the game of investing, and they are out. Of course, even in the game of investing they might be out, but this is another point. Certainly one of the best-selling silver dollar books of all time is Les and Sue Fox's Silver Dollar Fortune Telling, which went through several editions through the mid-1980s.
Without doubt, fortunes could have been made if you had bought bags of Mint State silver dollars years ago, and probably fortunes can be made today if you buy the right coins. However, the greatest "fortune" is in the enjoyment of owning the coins themselves, an asset almost always overlooked by writers on the subject of investment.
How curious it is that the greatest profits in the silver dollar market have been made by collectors who have acquired their coins for numismatic purposes, with collecting foremost in their minds and investing a distant second consideration. On an early page of Silver Dollar Fortune Telling, 1985 edition, is a picture of an 1895 Morgan which cost $38 when Herbert Bergen, a past president of the American Numismatic Association, bought it in 1946. "It was next sold to silver dollar collector Kent Brennan of Spokane, Washington at auction in 1979 for $34,500."
A nice profit this, and I congratulated the late Herb Bergen, whom I knew quite well, on the remarkable returns from his coin "investments." However, Herb was not an investor. Instead, he was a collector, and a very serious one. Even when he could no longer travel on his own, he was sufficiently involved in numismatics that he would have his grandson drive him from his home in Fullerton, California to my office (in Los Angeles at the time) so we could "talk coins." Herb collected just about everything from colonials to gold, with a special interest in die varieties of early quarter dollars. In our many discussions, I never heard the word investment. And yet, Herb's collection far outranked just about every investment one could compare it to on Wall Street, in the real estate market, or just about anywhere else.
The point of this is that a fine, high-grade, historical, and intellectually stimulating collection has the potential of being a fine financial investment as well, especially if you go about acquiring coins by using numismatic knowledge. I could go on and on about the virtues of building a numismatic library, learning about coins, etc., but this is not the place.
It is interesting to read about coin prices and investment, and this area furnishes a separate possibility for enjoying silver dollars, especially in a rising market. To this end, I have included in the present book a study of price movements of various silver dollars and trade dollars at five-year intervals from their time of issue to the present. These figures have been supplemented with ample material from auctions, advertisements, and dealers' price lists.