When it comes to coin collecting, Dave Baldwin is seeing change.

No longer is the hobby reserved for a relative few elite collectors who actually know what the word “numismatic” means. Now, it’s reaching the masses.

“It’s a really accessible hobby,” said Baldwin, president of the Lawrence Coin Club. “You can pick them up out of change; you don’t even have to buy coins.”

The gain in popularity for numismatics – the technical name for coin collecting – is thanks in part to the U.S. Mint’s 50 State Quarters Program, which will unveil a quarter representing Kansas Friday at the Kansas State Fair. It features a buffalo and sunflower, two longtime symbols of the state.

The U.S. Mint’s program, which is releasing coins representing each state between 1999 to 2008, has left amateur coin collectors sorting through piles of change, looking for state quarters they haven’t nabbed. Many of the amateur collectors are keeping their coins in cardboard maps with quarter-size holes punched in them.

Dave Baldwin, president of the Lawrence Coin Club, holds a Kansas quarter encased in a proof set of uncirculated coins. The unveiling of the new quarter will kick off the Kansas State Fair on Friday in Hutchinson. The 50 State Quarters Program has rekindled interest in coin collecting.

“There are a lot of new collectors – especially kids – who are getting into it,” said Mark McWherter, chairman of the 37th annual Johnson County Numismatic Society Coin Show, scheduled for Oct. 8-9 in Lenexa. “The estimate is 140 to 160 million people are collecting the quarters. They’re not serious collectors, but there will be people who will switch over to going to the shows.”

Some of those more serious collectors gather for monthly meetings of the Lawrence Coin Club. The group meets at 7 p.m. the second Tuesday of each month at the Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vt.

Baldwin, a home remodeler, has been collecting coins for 30 years. He focuses much of his effort on finding high-quality Lincoln cents.

He declined to discuss the details of his collection, such as how much it’s worth and what is his most valuable coin. He said he keeps them in a safe deposit box at a bank to protect them from would-be thieves and provide temperature and humidity control.

Large Cents

Baldwin said many collectors start by gathering Lincoln cents (the term “penny” is technically incorrect). They try to get the coins from each year, and from each mint where they were made.

Another common method is to collect “mint sets” – all of the coins the U.S. Mint made for a given year.

And some collectors specialize in other, more rare coins – those with errors on them, for example, or colonial-era “tokens” made before the United States had official currency. Foreign coins also are collected by some, though most of those don’t carry much value in the United States, Baldwin said.

Coin collecting has gotten a boost statewide because of Friday's release of the new Kansas quarter. Here's an old find: currency from 1849.

“In collecting, we refer to it as history in your hand,” McWherter said. “You can be holding an ancient coin, and who knows who could have held it? It might have been a Roman senator or a Greek merchant. With U.S. coins – the early stuff – who knows who held it? It could have been the president of the United States.”

McWherter and Baldwin said that because the state quarters were made in bulk and designed to be collectible, it would be unlikely for them to be worth more than 25 cents in the future. But their value to the coin collecting hobby is already being felt.

And, if nothing else, the quarters have added new art elements to coins that hadn’t changed much through the years.

“The design looks nice,” McWherter said of the Kansas quarter. “I personally was really concerned it would end up looking like a rectangle with a sunflower, but it turned out OK.”