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Discover Collecting Friends
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, 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!
Steve Roach
Steve Roach has been deeply involved with numismatics for more than 30 years, starting as a young coin collector in Michigan. Two years spent as a coin grader, nearly three years at a major coin wholesaler, and a stint as a paintings specialist at an international auction house have given Steve a rich understanding of the hobby, its market and the unique personalities and exceptional objects that make collecting meaningful.
Steve joined Coin World as a columnist in 2006, serving as editor-in-chief and now as editor-at-large. He worked briefly alongside Dennis on the CCAC, before taking a full-time position in the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Steve teaches classes on the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice to appraisers around the world and lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dennis Tucker
Dennis Tucker has been a coin collector since childhood, when his big brother gave him a 1937 Buffalo nickel and showed him the Red Book. Today he actively collects United States Mint commemorative medals and coins; Philippine coins struck under U.S. sovereignty; and historical and modern art medals.
As publisher at Whitman Publishing, he has overseen more than 300 books on numismatics, military history, and other nonfiction subjects. Since 2016 he has served as the numismatic specialist on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee.
Dennis grew up in New York and moved more than 20 years ago to Atlanta, Georgia, where he and his family currently live.