About Us

Coin Rarities Online is a full service internet and mail order coin company run by partners Dave Wnuck and John Agre.

We buy, sell and trade rare coins and related items on a retail and wholesale basis and provide numismatic services to our clients. We attend major coin shows and coin auctions around the country and, sometimes, around the world. We are members of major numismatic organizations and clubs.

It's pretty simple, really.

Our business philosophy is not very complicated either:

We believe in absolute honesty and integrity in all of our dealings.

We believe it is our responsibility to add value for our clients, and we hope that if we do that we can earn a fair return for ourselves.

We believe in research and scholarship, and we are convinced that there is simply no substitute for doing one's homework.

We believe in the preservation of numismatic history and abhor the recent trends of conserving perfectly fine original coins  in order to secure higher grades.

We believe in modesty and discretion over hype and marketing flash.

We believe there are many ways to enjoy this great hobby and respect every individual collector's own definition of what is right for them.

And, finally, we believe that coin collecting should be fun.

Dave Wnuck

Dave is the founder Coin Rarities Online, and now a partner in the business.

Since 1977, he has specialized in early US coinage.

While still in high school, his paper on US coins won the American Numismatic Association's Junior Literary Award in 1978, for which he won his first of two scholarships to the ANA's annual Summer Seminar.

Dave earned a dual degree in industrial Engineering and Business Management from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts in just 3.5 years.

Since that time, Dave has been a full-time professional numismatist and a recognized authority in the numismatic marketplace.

He has done appraisals for the US Marshalls Service, several Museums and countless banks, estates, lawyers and individuals.

He has written articles (and has been interviewed about) early US gold coinage. He has twice been a panelist on the well-respected Rosen Numismatic Advisory's Annual Crystal Ball team and was a participant (as a numismatic appraiser) at Connecticut Public Television's Antiques Appraisal Day. And you will find Dave's name listed in the front of the Guide Book of United States Coins as a contributor.

Dave's extensive knowledge and experience in colonial coins, early US gold coins and US type coins allows him to assist clients in a wide range of collecting endeavours.

Contact: dave@coinraritiesonline.com

John Agre

John joined Coin Rarities Online in 2006, and became an equal partner in the business during the year.

He has been collecting and studying coins since 1970, when at the age of 7 he began building a US type set. Since that time, he has collected, studied, bought and sold most everything, from world coins to US commemoratives to Buffalo nickels to colonial and early American coins.

John earned his MBA from Cornell University, coupled with degrees in Fine Art and Economics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

For the last 15 years John has been on the ‘other side’, working in international business for a number of companies including stints living in Japan and Singapore.

During much of that period John has continued his extensive research of colonial and early American coins in an effort to create a comprehensive photographic condition census of all issues. The result of that undertaking is a compendium of colonial coin information that is objective, verifiable and often at odds with conventional wisdom and accepted theories of rarity and populations.

John will be using this information, along with his background and experienced eye to help clients achieve their numismatic goals.

Contact: john@coinraritiesonline.com

We update the site in some way just about every day. Personally, we hate going to websites that never change (in fact, we stop going to them if they don't change after a reasonable period of time), so we decided early on that ours wouldn't be one of those.

The Home Page usually contains - in addition to all the basic stuff - information about our next show, and a recap of our last one.  We also like to give some advance notice about our next scheduled Early Bird notification so you can keep an eye out for it.  And sometimes we just put up an article of topical interest (like this one).

Our Coin Commentary is kind of our 'Op Ed' piece where we get to say whatever we want. We hope you'll find it interesting and/or thought provoking. If you disagree with what we say, email us and tell us why. If you write something really good, maybe we'll go ahead and post that (with your permission, of course).

The Road Report feature (the most popular section of the site based on the feedback we get) contains a vivid (or at least semi-vivid) description of what we saw, did, experienced, bid on, bought and/or sold on our travels. We like to think of this as a cross between an old Rare Coin Review and an article by Dave Barry.

Next we have Our Coins, which we presume is the primary reason people visit a coin website - to see the coins. Our inventory presentation is different than most of what you'll find online in several ways:

• The selection of items is varied and contains things that you probably won't see anywhere else. Who knows, maybe you'll discover something interesting in a series or area that you hadn't considered before.

• We personally never enjoy hunting through search screens on dealer websites to find coins of potential interest, so we decided to put all of our inventory on one page so you can see it all without breaking a sweat or injuring yourself.

• Our pictures are the best we can possibly obtain, shot for us by the preeminent coin photographers in the business today.

• We endeavor to write the description of each item as it might have appeared in an old New Netherland's or Bowers and Ruddy auction catalog. We relate meaningful information about the coins' history and rarity, incorporating our own proprietary research where possible, in what we hope is an interesting and informative way. And you'll note that we use exclamation points only when absolutely necessary.

Next we have Our Archive, where you get to see all of the really cool coins that you missed. This is a work in progress still, as unfortunately we don't have good pictures of all of the coins that have passed through our hands through the years, and we decided that listing a coin in this section without a photo was no fun.  We'll be adding some 'classics' to this section whenever we can, so keep an eye out for them.

A more recent addition is our Ad Archive, which we created based on input from our customers. Hey, we aim to give the people what they want, and they apparently wanted to see all of our old ads in one place. Click on the ads themselves and you can see what we were thinking when we wrote them.

Finally, we can't forget our little black Early Bird button. Push it, and you too can have first shot at all of our latest acquisitions before they appear on the site.

And if anyone ever has any suggestions for what we can do better, we sure would like to hear them.

Dave Wnuck & John Agre

Coin Rarities staff are long time members of many respected numismatic clubs and organizations:

• American Numismatic Association

• American Numismatic Society

• Colonial Coin Collectors' Club

• Early American Coppers Club

• Florida United Numismatists

• New England Numismatic Association

• John Reich Collector's Society

• Society of US Pattern Collectors

• Society of Private and Pioneer Numismatists

• US Mexican Numismatic Association