You can win £200 by telling us - in 500 words - why you became a collector!

It's that easy....


We're looking for something that grabs our attention, something interesting - so get writing - you have until January 31 2008

Send your entries in to the COIN NEWS ofice or email info@tokenpublishing.com

Full details are as follows:

Essay Competition—win £200!


Thanks once again to the generosity of COIN NEWS reader Geoff Simms we are able to offer readers the chance to win £200 with the Token Publishing essay competition!

The competition we ran last year was for junior collectors and whilst we did have a good response the entries weren’t perhaps as numerous as we might have hoped (we got dozens but in our naivety we had hoped for hundreds). There are, we fear, perhaps not hundreds of junior collectors out there! One thing did surprise us though and that was the number of readers who wrote/telephoned/emailed stating that actually they’d have liked to have taken part but were excluded because it was only open to under 18s (although judging by a couple of the entries there was a certain amount of “ghost writing” by some slightly older collectors—you know who you are!).

With this in mind this year’s competition is once again going to be open to Junior collectors (after all we really do want to encourage as many as possible) but there is also another category for all of us older numismatists. This year there will be a first prize of £200 and a second prize of £100 in each of two categories, i.e. there will be four prizes in total: (1) “18 and under” (on January 31 2008) and (2) the “Open” category for everyone else! The subject this time around is slightly different too—we want you to tell us how, and why, you started collecting in the first place!

Did you check your change for rarities—those Victorian shillings still in circulation in the 1960s? Did you search for the H or KN pennies? Did you bring back coins from holiday and get the “bug” that way? Maybe you’re a metal detectorist, archaeologist or historian and have come to coins as an adult through your other hobby, or maybe it was a childhood passion. Did your father perhaps collect? Or maybe your friends did. Maybe you do it for investment and started in preference to buying shares or maybe you used to collect something else and “drifted” into coins almost by accident! Tell us about when you started collecting too: were you a pre-decimal coin hunter or have you only grown up with the uniformity of the modern coinage? Tell us what first attracted you to this hobby and, of course what’s kept you here—and try and do it all in 500 words or less!

To enter all you have to do is send your work to us at “Essay Competition”, Token Publishing Ltd, Orchard House, Duchy Road, Heathpark, Honiton EX14 1YD. All entries must be received by January 31, 2008 at the latest. There are no right or wrongs in this . . . quite simply, the ones that catch our imagination best will win—it’s that easy, so get writing!

Please note that all entries will automatically be put forward to the “Open” category unless clearly marked as being for the “Under-18” category. Remember we’re looking for 500 words or less—we aren’t going to be too strict on this but no full numismatic autobiographies please —one side or so of A4 is fine!

Good Luck!

—We look forward to hearing from you and are hoping for some great tales! The winning entries will be published in a forthcoming issue of COIN NEWS.