All we survey

Thank you to all those who have so far sent back their completed surveys (on the back page of the July issue), in some areas they have proved exceptionally enlightening, in others they have reinforced what we already knew. We will publish the full results in due course but there won’t be too many surprises! It seems that most of our readers are male, although we have had a number of women write into us, most seem to be over 35, although whether this is because it is an “older man’s hobby” or because financial constraints are greater on the young we cannot tell. Most of you buy your magazine every month and, at this stage most seem to be subscribers, although as I write this it is still early in July and therefore it is logical to assume that those who’ve had their magazines first (i.e. subscribers) will be the first to reply. Most of you collect British coinage, no surprise for readers of a British magazine and most of the coins that are collected are milled, again not surprising given the sheer number of coins out there to collect and the relative availability of good examples. Most of you are perfectly satisfied with the current range and subject matter of the articles, something that is particularly pleasing to the Editorial team as we do work hard to get the balance right! There have been the inevitable rash of those who would like to see more of one thing and less of another with the coin collectors seemingly happy with the mix as it is, the banknote collectors wanting more banknotes and less of most other things to make up for that and the token collectors wanting a magazine full of tokens, tokens and more tokens with maybe the odd coin related article thrown in – provided it has something to do with tokens somewhere. Again no huge shocks there! The two areas we were most surprised at were your appetite for News and Views and other “facts” and your membership, or lack thereof, of Numismatic Societies. So far over 80% of those who have replied want to see more numismatic news every month with the other 20% quite happy as it is – no one wants less, the figures for Market Scene are similar. As for societies well further to my comment two months ago we knew that numbers were small but we hadn’t realised how small – so far less than 7% of respondents belong to society or coin club that’s quite a depressing statistic. It is actually as a response to this that we have decided to throw open the COIN NEWS Coinex trophy for best Numismatic Display to individuals as well as Societies – so if you’re interested get something together, if you want more information you can contact either ourselves or the BNTA Personally I think it a great shame that more collectors aren’t members of Societies, I’ve touched on this subject before I know but I must confess to being more than a little shocked and disappointed at how few readers actually are members and I would, once again, encourage you all to at least visit your local society – you might be surprised! Of course these figures are only the tip of the iceberg and who knows, after a month or so we may find that in fact far more of you are members than not and all my pleas are for nought, I do hope so. It is of course possible that the apparent lack of membership is that Society members do tend to share their COIN NEWS copies around amongst each other (shame on you!) so it may well be that in fact far more readers are members than we think – it’s just they don’t want to cut up the communal copy – to that all I can say is either break the habit and buy your own or get a photocopy into us! There’s still plenty of time to complete these surveys and we are genuinely very interested in the results. Please do take the time to send us your opinions, we really would appreciate them – and as I say if you don’t want to rip up your magazine don’t worry, photocopies are perfectly acceptable or we’ll send you a copy direct from our offices. We know what we think you want in COIN NEWS every month but only by telling us can you be absolutely sure we have your collecting interests at heart. One last point we noted from the questionnaires we’ve had back so far – more of you than we thought regularly attend coin and banknote fairs, except it seems people in East Anglia – we’ve had a number of replies from people in Norfolk and Suffolk with “none in my local area” written across them – an opportunity for someone out there!