Touch a coin and you touch history.

Collectors with many years experience say numismatics has three main draw cards:  Rarity, Metallic Art and the Link between Coins and History.

In many of us there is a fundamental desire to own something which few other people can possess.  Numismatics has the facility through some of its great rarities, of allowing only a few people to own a particular type of coin.

Top class metallic art, whether it be the artist's skill or the engraver's ability to transfer inspired work into cold steel, is always admired.  Strong though these two factors are, history is probably the most compelling force in numismatics.

In the words of the late Dr Frank Mitchell on his introduction to numismatics.

"My final downfall came when an old family friend showed me his collection.  I listened spellbound as he introduced me to his coin portrait gallery.  He allowed me to hold a Macedonian tetradachm of Alexander the Great while he told me of his incredible exploits.  My hand trembled as I studied the fine portrait of Alexander in his lion-head headdress.  Two and a quarter thousand years ago he died - though only 33, the conqueror of most of the known world.  Suddenly, as I studied the coin, the truth dawned - I was holding History in my hand!

That surely is the key to the fascination of numismatics.  Every little piece of metal which is a coin has a story to tell.  Each is a link in the chain of human history, starting from that far-off day in about 700 B.C. when a King of Lydia in Asia Minor first had the bright idea of stamping his royal seal on a little chunk of silver, as his personal guarantee of its purity and value.  Since then, over the centuries, as civilisations waxed and waned, many of mankind's works of art which mirror the culture of their time, portraits of men and women whose influence have molded the course of history.

Where else but in numismatics can one contain twenty six centuries of art, of culture and of history in one small cabinet?"