How to start a coin collection from a drawer

Coins · 5 September 2026

Nothing needs buying to begin. The first coins are already in the house – in a drawer, a jar, a travel wallet, a grandparent's box – and an open image catalogue identifies them for free. Albums, capsules and reference books come later, once the direction of the collection is clear. What matters at the start is not what you acquire but what you avoid doing to what you already have.

Step 1. Gather what is already there

Empty the jar, the drawer and the travel wallet onto a soft cloth. Foreign change left over from trips, coins inherited in a box, anything that stopped circulating – that is a starting collection. It costs nothing and, unlike a bought lot, it has a story attached to each piece.

Step 2. Sort before you judge

Sort by country, then by denomination, then by year. Do it before looking anything up: sorting alone answers most of the questions a beginner asks, because it shows which coins are duplicates and which are the only example of their type. Only after sorting does it make sense to ask what any one coin is.

Step 3. Handle correctly from day one

• Hold coins by the edge. Fingerprints on the field etch in over time and never fully leave.
• Work over a cloth, not a hard table – a dropped coin picks up rim damage that stays with it.
• Never stack loose coins in a bag or jar: most of the surface damage in a household collection happens there.
• Do not clean anything. This is the single most expensive mistake a beginner makes, and it is explained in full in the guide to cleaning old coins.

Step 4. Store cheaply but properly

Cardboard boxes with paper envelopes or cardboard 2×2 holders work perfectly for the first months. What matters is that coins do not touch each other, that the material is not soft PVC, and that the place is dry and dark. Anything beyond that is convenience, not preservation.

Step 5. Choose a direction

Collecting all coins is impossible, and that is where most first collections stop. Three directions work well and each has a visible finish line:

1. One country's series. A full run of denominations, then years within them – gaps are obvious at a glance.
2. One theme. Ships, animals, space, architecture. Crosses borders and never runs out.
3. One period. A decade or a reform-to-reform span, which teaches how money changed and why.

How to pick between them is covered in the guide to choosing a collecting theme.

Step 6. Identify with an open catalogue

No price guide is needed to answer what a coin is. The open archive holds 855 Soviet coins, 523 of them dated, from the silver small change of the 1920s through the reform series of 1961–1991 to the last issues. Most are shown from both sides, which is exactly what identification needs. Read the denomination and year first, then compare the design with the archive image, then look at condition – in that order, as described in the guide to reading coin condition.

Open the sections: coins and banknotes, badges.

What not to do at the start

• Do not buy bulk lots of world coins: they are mostly common circulation pieces with no direction.
• Do not clean, polish or lacquer anything.
• Do not drill, mount or glue a coin into anything.
• Do not discard duplicates – they are trading stock and reference examples for comparison.
• Do not chase a value figure before you can read condition; on common coins condition decides almost everything.