PRINCETON, N.J. – Alan Stahl has a lot of change on his hands – and not the kind you can cash in at any bank.
The curator of Princeton University’s numismatic collection is in charge of protecting and displaying tens of thousands of coins, tokens, medals and pieces of paper money.
“The funny thing is, I’ve never owned a personal coin collection,” said Stahl, 60.

The 150-year-old collection started as an assemblage of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman coins. Stahl estimates it now contains about 80,000 items.

New acquisitions in the past year have made the collection even more diverse: a donation of 2,000 ancient Chinese coins and the purchase of more than 800 medieval Greek coins, bought for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

About a dozen university students each spend a few hours a week cataloging the coins. So far, the collection’s online system has more than 3,000 coins listed, about 1,000 coins entered in each year.

“At this rate, we’ll be done in 50 years,” Stahl said. For the students, cataloging the coins is an education in itself.

Read Full Story By CHRIS NEWMARKER in The Nashua Telegraph