Welcome to Common Cents where you can keep track of your coin collection and those of others in order to trade. This site lets you concentrate on the coin differences you care about: do you collect each coin every year? Just the special quarters? Just the different "heads" on your pennies?
Here we track only circulated coins and we do not consider coin grading or market values. There are other excellent resources for those topics, such as Coins of Canada (Haxby and Willey) and A Guide Book of United States Coins "The Red Book" (Bressett, Ed.). This site is primarily for hobby collecting, less for the serious coin collector. (But we welcome your suggestions and feedback to that effect.)
To get set up with a login and password, Join. Choose your Preferences based on what you collect, then hit your Want It list and update the things you have in order to create a Got It list and an Extras list.
Have anything to add, coin details, better images? Email us. Coins are scanned on a flatbed in colour at 360 dpi with thumbnails reduced by 50%. Some images have been temporarily borrowed from other sources until we can scan them in. Images of older coins have been copied from the Canadian Currency Museum.
Happy collecting!
Year Range searching Now instead of just one year you can search on a year range, e.g. 1950-1959, or even use ranges such as "1950 - " or " - 1999" for all coins after a given year or all coins up to a given year. Any symbol, not just the dash, will do. Searching on "1999 to 2005" works as well.
Coin orientation now supported Have you noticed that US coins flip top to bottom while Canadian coins flip left to right? These characteristics are now in the database and mousing over a coin reverse animates it flipping over the correct way. (This behaviour is buggy in Safari when zoomed in; please let us know of any other coin flipping problems and what browser you are using.)
"Who has it" and "Who needs it" buttons Find other uesrs who need your extras, or who have extra coins you need. These are available in the Coin Detail screen. Just click on any coin in a list or a search to see a coin's details along with these new buttons.
New Collection link Shows all coins being collected regardless of the quantity on hand.
New Message Board for logged in users.This is a simple bulletin board for posting your trading items or other coin-related details to share with other users.
The Want It list is no longer automatic when you log in.We found some lists take a long time to display, and you don't always want to see your entire collection each time you log in.The various lists now have optional Country, Denomination and Year controls to limit the search of your own list.
New Hide Images and Print buttons.The Hide Images button gives you a quick list without pictures, which you can then print and keep in your pocket while traveling.
How come the coin pictures show the wrong years?We don't have an image for every coin of every year, so if the only difference on an image is the year in its normal position, another year's image is often used. In special years such as 1992 and 2002 (for Canadian coins) we consider the dates to be different if doubled (e.g. 1867-1992) or missing altogether (e.g. the reverses in 2002). The same goes for mint marks, explained in the next question.
What are designations like "P" and "H" on some coins?These are mint marks. Early Canadian coins struck at the Heaton mint in England show "H". Recent Canadian coins with "P" indicated nickel plated steel, as opposed to the earlier nickel and nickel-copper alloy types. US coins show "D" or "P" for Delaware or Philadelphia mints respectively (a third type "S" for San Francisco is used only for mint quality or proof coins, not listed on this site).
How come my name is not in the user list until I log in?You can make your collection public in the preferences page, or choose only the users you'd like to share it with.
I changed my preferences for a type of coin and now my on-hand and wanted numbers are all messed up. Why? The site will present to you a list of coins that represent one of each "type" based on what you collect. So if your Canadian quarters are set to collect reverses (tails) you'll only get one Caribou quarter in your list, even though there are dozens of these quarters listed in the site: your preferences say that a Caribou quarter with a different date on it is not a different "type" for you.
Now if your preferences were originally set to collect every year of Canadian quarter, you would get one for each year in your list. But if your preferences are then changed to just collect by reverse, the site will only give you one of each type to work with, except where you've already entered the number wanted or on-hand for coins that are now not considered a type.
It works like this so that you can add or subtract from what the site considers a type: you might not care about Caribou quarters, and un-check Collecting for that quarter, and you might want to check Collecting on the 1947 quarters with the dot or the Maple Leaf on them, even though they're not considered a new reverse type (and please let us know if you get any extras of those!) Email us with any questions or if things get messed up. (To find unusual coins like the 1947 quarters mentioned, use the search page.)
Why are so many US coins missing from the site?We're adding more listings as time allows, but the pay is low at Common Cents; anyone wishing to help can contact us for details.