Collector Lore. A characteristic of a numismatic or medallic specimen that makes it appealing to a collector. This could be most any fact about the item but the collector or numismatist must be aware of it. The owner must have knowledge of the characteristic – it can be unique to the piece at hand – or perhaps to all specimens of that variety or type. Mint errors, for example, posses collector lore, as the collector must have knowledge of the error and understand how the piece occurred in the minting process.

Collector lore may not be obvious or even evident on the item itself. It could be a fact about the design, the artist, diesinker, or sculptor that created it, its issuance or the history of the piece. “He was 75 and almost blind when he engraved the die that stuck this piece.” It is a background fact that a collector might find interesting, a statement about the item that entails human interest or physical evidence about the item.

Collector lore may be learned from research, or be an apocryphal story handed down verbally form the past. It is something that makes the piece interesting, distinctive, different from the ordinary, separating it, perhaps, from others in the same series. It is always useful to mention any collector lore in cataloging.