Chicago International Coin Fair Opens This Week

The Chicago International Coin Fair will celebrate its 25th anniversary when the show is held April 7-9 at the Ramada Plaza Hotel O'Hare.

The show has gone through some good times and some bad times. It has been owned by Ed Milas of RARCOA and is currently owned by Krause Publications. The show was held in downtown Chicago for years. Now it is held near the airport.

The history of this show mirrors the experience of many coin shows regardless of their size or stature among collectors. Coin shows are a major component of coin collecting, just as is buying or selling on the Internet, the coin club, hobby publications and mail order business transactions.

Coin collecting went through a growth period during the 1960s. During this time many new coin clubs were formed, it seemed as if there was a coin store on every corner and shows began to appear every weekend somewhere around the United States.

The Chicago International Coin Fair (CICF) was founded as this "boom" time began to slow. Alongside the New York International Numismatic Convention held every December, it became one of the two most important world coin shows in the country. The show has had its ups and downs ever since. The biggest "down" may have been when the downtown Chicago hotels showed no further interest in booking the show because coin collecting simply didn't bring as many people to the hotel compared to other convention activities in other fields.

This is a shame, but it is the story of coin show activity. Some shows are continually held every weekend at the same location or same circuit of locations until people tire of the shows and they sputter out. The nice thing about going to a big annual show is that the merchandise has had time to turn over. This doesn't happen very quickly at the small weekly shows.

The greater problem, however, is that the vast majority of collectors never darken the doorway of a coin show. A major hobby publication readership survey several years ago indicated that the average collector never ventures further than a 50-mile radius from his home to attend a show. The same survey indicated a majority of the readers of this publication considered the publication itself to be their primary source of hobby information, where to purchase coins and virtually their coin club.

There is a lot more to coin collecting than that. Ask any recruiter hiring people for sales jobs (outside the coin business) and they will tell you not to tell anyone you are a coin collector or someone will automatically decide you are an introvert, a closet collector.

Actually, extroverts are the ones who dominate attendance at coin shows. This same hobby publication may have been pleased that a majority of their readers buy exclusively from the ads in the publication, but these folks are missing the boat. Coin collecting is a social hobby. Look at the number of people asking questions regarding the hobby on the Internet. Go to a coin show and see what really goes on. It isn't just buying and selling. It includes club meetings, discussion groups and just groups of people practicing bragging skills on each other.

The coin show has taken it on the chin many times because of downturns in the hobby, a failure of hotels to want to book the shows and more recently because it has become so easy to purchase coins on the Internet. Then again, even the Internet can become a virtual coin show. Efforts in this direction have already been taken with significant success. A show in Columbus, Ohio, during 1999 included Internet transactions at bourse tables shown on a big screen on the bourse floor.

The CICF isn't for everybody. Lots of people visiting the CoinUniverse.com site collect strictly US coins. The point of this story is that if you don't visit coin shows as part of your hobby activities you really are missing something.