Strategy
Steve: Committing to a strategy is a key to success…until sometimes it isn’t. An article in the March 12, 2025, issue of the Wall St. Journal showcased a unique museum concept: The Museum of Failure, which focuses on strategies that did not bring the desired results. Among the exhibits: Crystal Pepsi, the soda
Trends come and go, and the traveling “Museum of Failure” shows how innovation can bring failure. Samuel West, its founder hoped his museum would provide an “exciting and fun way to communicate the ideas of destigmatizing failure and accepting it.”
One of West’s favorite quotes is from Jon Sinclair who said, “Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.”
I can say that I didn’t have a strategy when I started collecting or when I incorporated numismatics in my career. When I joined Coin World as a monthly columnist in 2006 I wasn’t sure where my career would take me, but I knew that there was a legacy to the publication that was built on a standard of quality that I tried to maintain in my various roles there over the next two decades. The ebbs and flows of the hobby, personalities and the larger coin market don’t change that standard. It helps keep things in perspective, at least for me: teach people about the items they might already have and try to get people excited about new collecting areas.
The “failures” like odd-denominations such as tiny silver 3-cent “Trime” and the 20-cent piece, or $4 gold “Stellas” are the type of things that introduce people to our hobby.
[Image: Sometimes experiments aren’t successful like the 20-cent piece denomination. This Judd-1396 pattern for a proposed design for the short-lived denomination graded Proof 66 Cameo by PCGS sold for $38,400 at Heritage’s Harry W. Bass, Jr. Core Collection Part IV auction as part of the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in 2023. TrueView image provided by Collectors Universe via Heritage Auctions.]
Dennis, as you think about your nearly 20 years as publisher at Whitman Publishing, what was your strategy? Coin markets and precious metals moved up and down, but how did you think about the publications you helped put out there in terms of preserving the current audience while building a new one?
Dennis: Coin World has a long tradition of quality, and Whitman Publishing does, too. At Whitman I was mentored in the commitment to quality by Kenneth Bressett and Q. David Bowers, among others.
An individual copy of the Red Book might be for sale to anyone who wants it, but the Red Book itself wasn’t for sale. It was a peerless brand, a tradition, a part of the hobby for generations. You couldn’t buy your way onto its list of pricing contributors; you had to earn that honor by proving your chops in the marketplace. Ken always held firm against dealers who wanted to corner a market or promote a particular coin and tried to influence the Red Book’s published pricing. I remember the occasional pressure campaign to include certain die varieties in the chart listings (I knew that the requestors owned quantities of them), or to include certain medals or tokens that fall outside the scope of the book. I kept a file of form letters to reply to such requests, they were so frequent!
We were there to report on the market, not to influence markets ourselves, nor let anyone piggyback on Whitman’s reputation to promote their own biased interests.
At the same time, of course, we had to stay nimble and responsive to legitimate trends. Numismatics is a living and breathing ecosystem. Collectors’ interests grow and shrink and change over time. We had to keep our finger on the pulse of the hobby community, and we did make editorial changes—some substantial, some relatively minor—to reflect major developments. For example, we expanded the lower end of the grades priced for many series, especially colonials and early coppers, and we priced more of the high grades for “hot” coin types and those where the market showed significant premiums.
Something Ken often tells me is that every coin collector thinks of the Red Book as belonging to himself. It’s such a cornerstone of the hobby. If you collect U.S. coins and you’re less than 100 years old, the Red Book has been part of your journey.
Like Ken, Dave Bowers was always focused on personal and professional integrity. His career as a dealer stretches back to the 1950s. His philosophy, he’s told me many times, is to do business with everyone as if they’re a member of his family, to treat customers the way he would want a sibling or cousin to be treated. He emphasizes sharing information. He’s kept up correspondence with other researchers, historians, museum curators, Mint officials . . . but would just as quickly answer a letter from a kid who likes State quarters. “To have a friend, be a friend” is how he sums it up, and that approach obviously paid off. I can’t recall a single person who ever said, “No, I don’t want to participate in your newest project.”
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Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, former Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.
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