Celebration of currency: Great Southwest Coin Expo Fall 2024 features 90 dealers

Currency from different countries and coins dating back thousands of years will be some of the highlights at the fall 2024 Great Southwest Coin Expo.

The event, which takes place from Friday, Nov. 8, to Sunday, Nov. 10, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, is open to the public and has something for all ages.

Celebration of currency: Great Southwest Coin Expo Fall 2024 features 90 dealers

“There will be everything from coins and currency, there will be jewelry, gold and silver bullion,” said Matthew Peacock, assistant show chair. “Every country will be represented with both coins and currency. We have a lot of dealers that specialize in world coins or world currency. We have a couple dealers that only deal in ancient coins, 2,500 years old would be the oldest. There’s stuff that goes all the way back to like, 700 B.C. and just other collectibles, antiques, jewelry, a little bit of spillover like that.”

The Great Southwest Coin Expo has been taking place since the 1970s. The Albuquerque Coin Club currently holds the expo in April and in November.

The expos usually feature about 80 dealers, and this November the number of dealers has slightly increased.

“This time it’s gonna be 90 dealer tables because we’re at a new venue, so we got a little more room,” Peacock said. “It’s going to be 90 dealer tables of coins and bullion and other collectibles related to coins. We’ve got dealers from about eight, nine different states that come to the show, and even a couple from Mexico will occasionally come through.”

Some fun children’s activities include a scavenger hunt for ages 17 and younger. Participants will receive a scavenger sheet that will direct them to dealers and other people involved with the show, who will ask them a trivia question. A coin will be given to children who answer correctly.

“If they complete the scavenger hunt, they get a bigger prize,” Peacock said. “There’s a few different things going on for kids like that. We’ll have the American Numismatic Association represented there. This is the club that kind of oversees all the other smaller clubs in the country. So they’ll be there signing up members and having their own kid activities and things like that.”

The coin expo also will feature books and coin supplies, as well as provide information on how to attend educational classes.

The classes take place during Albuquerque Coin Club meetings, and coin expo eventgoers can sign up to attend.

“Those actually take place at our meetings, but we sign people up at the shows a lot and get them interested in it,” Peacock said. “The most recent one we had was ‘Numismatics in New Mexico during the Civil War.’ So, that covered the types of coins and substitutes for money that we were using during the Civil War here in the state of New Mexico. It was really interesting. We were using a lot of stuff from Mexico, from Spain. We even had some French coins still circulating here because the coins that were being made in Philadelphia weren’t making it all the way out here. They were kind of being used up primarily on the East Coast.”

The Albuquerque Coin Club, which was founded in 1953, has been putting on educational displays at Expo New Mexico every year.

“We give (presenters) 20 minutes, but sometimes they run a little long, maybe up to 45 minutes for the presentation,” Peacock said. “And then there’s a quiz afterwards, a Q&A section. We give prizes for the quiz, just to make it fun, and it’s $1 tokens you can use toward the auction at the end of the night. We’ve got a whole lot of activities that we do at the monthly meeting, and the educational presentation is just an important part of that.”