Storage

Air is what tarnishes a penny, and a loose coin in a pocket picks up scratches on top. Good storage is mostly about keeping the coins dry, snug, and away from each other.

On the road

Anything small with a screw top works. A standard prescription bottle, the 8-dram size, holds exactly twelve pennies and twenty-four quarters: twelve pressings, pre-stacked and ready. A plastic chewing-gum tube holds about fifty finished pennies and fits in a pocket. Keep pressed and unpressed coins in separate containers so the finished ones do not get scratched.

Caught without a holder, wrap the pennies in a slip of paper with the location written on it, and put the rubber band around the paper rather than the coins.

Fitting pennies into a collector book

The sleeves in PennyCollector books are tight on purpose, so air cannot reach the coins. Pressed coins also vary in length, since machines run at different pressures and copper and zinc stretch differently. When one will not go in:

  1. Lead with the tail, the pointed end.
  2. Flatten the coin gently between finger and thumb if it has a curve.
  3. Use the edge of a quarter to push it the last bit.
  4. Curved needle-nose pliers for the stubborn ones.

Stopping tarnish for good

A clear coat seals the copper from the air. Water-based clear polyurethane, the kind sold for wood floors, is the same product used to seal the pennies set into the covers of PennyCollector books, and it lasts. Clear nail polish is the quick version and comes off again with remover if the result disappoints. Either way, the coin must be completely dry and clean first, or the coat seals the tarnish in.

Books should live somewhere dry. In twenty years of selling them, reports of coins changing color inside a book number in the single digits, and every one traced back to moisture.

Curved pennies

Some designs come out of the machine with an S-shaped bend. Collectors call it potato-chipping, and it is down to how a particular die takes the metal. Copper does it more than zinc. A gentle press between the fingers straightens most of them; a night under a heavy book handles the rest.