Collecting coins and paper money- where it can lead you

I am not only a person who is collecting coins and paper money. I have worked for several museums, on the collections that other people have donated, and of course have volunteered my time to help other museums.
The Vancouver Museum was once housed in the Carnegie Library. This building was built and supported with funds from Andrew Carnegie. The museum's Chinese coin collection was housed in several window-sized frames, and displayed over the stair well where no-one could get a good look at them.
During the Canadian Centennial of 1967, a new museum was built to house many collections, including the coin and paper money collections of the museum. This was at a new location in Vanier Park, which was right across the parking lot from the Vancouver Community Music School, where I was taking viola lessons. I was told that there was a Chinese coin collection in the museum, and I went over there to take a look after lessons one day. The assistant curator at the time, Carol Mayer, showed me the collection, and, noticing my enthusiasm as well as some "expertese", twisted my arm and got me to volunteer some time to catalogue the collection.
The Asian coin collection at the Vancouver Museum is about 1800 coins strong. It contains good examples of spade and knife money, from about 500-650 BC. It contains several examples of early round coins, many of the typical round-coins-with-a-square-hole Chinese (and Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese coins), plus very interesting struck copper and silver coins. It also contains an example of the Ming note (paper money of 1368-1398), several other old pieces of paper money, and a very interesting forgery of a Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 10 Taels note.
The collection is one of the best East Asian museum coin collections in North America. Of the ones I am familiar with, I would put it tied for second after the ANS Collection in New York, as far as East Asian coins are concerned. It does not have as many pieces as the collection at UBC's Museum of Anthropology, but it has an excellent breadth.
When most of the collection had been catalogued, I cut my left hand, right along the thumb tendon sheath. I could not play for several months. The Museum decided to do a large display about money, and I was hired to be the curator- to choose the pieces to display, to write the text, and to decide on illustrations. I ended up with a 36 case display, with 1080 pieces of coins and paper money. Each case had text- an overview, detailed descriptions of the pieces displayed, a related illustration, and often a map showing the area being illustrated. The display started with how coins are made, and then proceeded from China to Japan to India to Russia to Germany, France, Great Britain, and then to Canada, and closed with a section on forgeries and frauds. The display used materials mostly from the museum's own collection, and was supplemented by material from my collection, a local minting facility, and the Vancouver Police Department. I was told by some long-time collectors that it was the best display to be done in Canada on world coins, until the opening of the Bank of Canada Museum Collection in Ottawa.
After the coin display was done, I was asked to write a book about the display. It showed the coins in the display, their description, and had much more room to write about the significance of different pieces.
I did the revisions to the book on the phone, long distance from across North America. I attended a Suzuki Violin School in Wisconsin, and phoned in revisions every day on a pay phone. One day there was a tornado about 30 miles further north from where I was.
I also visited several museum collections, including the ANA in Colorado Springs, which houses the best library on Asian coins in North America, the Smithsonian collection in Washington, where they had just got a fabulous Chinese Paper Money collection which took up 10 cowboy boot-sized boxes, the ANS in New York, where I got to spend a day with Rose Chan Houston discussing the Chinese spade money and knive money of their fabulous collection, the ROM collection in Toronto, and the start of the Bank of Canada Museum in Ottawa. I reviewed their texts, and suggested a few revisions, and they reviewed mine, and did the same. All of the museums were memorable in some way, and most had incredibly fabulous people involved with the collections of coins and paper money.
I realized that there were very few people in North America with an expertise or even interest in Asian coins at this time, and Vancouver was lucky because it had more Asian people than most of the rest of Canada. Population dynamics have changed the demographic makeup of Vancouver considerably since that time. Vancouver now has a large percentage of people of Asian extraction, and with them more people who are knowledgeable about Asian coins.
I now buy and sell coins and paper money, and go to shows. I have done several multi-case displays. I have done talks about the life and money of Sun Yat Sen, talked on the radio, and for national conventions, and written articles about various aspects of collecting coins and paper money. I had no idea that the little gift that got me started would lead into such a different field, but that is a story for another blog. Such is the power of collecting coins and paper money.