In Store

For the little shop hidden in the convention center, currency holds steady.

For record collectors, California’s cavernous Amoeba Music stores, their deep bins filled with vinyl, are hallowed ground. If you’re a bibliophile, you know the layout of Powell’s Books in Portland better than you know certain neighborhoods in your hometown.

But if you’re a numismatist (that’s a coin collector to the rest of the world) or a philatelist (stamp collector), you will find your Valhalla at a small nondescript storefront tucked away inside the Washington State Convention Center building in downtown Seattle and called, simply, the Stamp & Coin Shop.

Photography by Kyle Johnson

If you’re not a collector yourself, walking into the shop can be a somewhat dizzying experience. The floors are dominated by a half-dozen display cases, filled with row upon row of coins, all tucked into their individual cardboard sleeves, each labeled with date, condition and price. Sitting in one corner is a handful of binders containing stamps from every corner of the globe (a cursory flip-through revealed German postage from the ’40s featuring a profile shot of Adolf Hitler and an eighteen-cent U.S. stamp proclaiming “Alcoholism: You Can Beat It!”). The walls feature a selection of collectors’ guides and a bevy of supplies for displaying your best items.

The Stamp & Coin Shop departs from the other two stores in that you’re not likely to have to jostle past gaggles of shoppers to grab that 1804 draped-bust-type half-cent coin you have been after for years. Over the course of the afternoon City Arts visited, the shop had only two customers – both older gentleman, both wanting to discuss the current price of gold.

It’s not an unusual conversation for John Konrad, who owns the business, to be having these days. He says that one of the ways he’s been able to keep his shop thriving in the current recession, when so many niche markets are folding, is through his dealings with gold and silver bullion and coins. “Our sales are off the charts,” the dapper sixty-two-year-old says with obvious pride.

What has fallen off is what he calls the “average collectors,” those folks in the market for the stuff they like rather than what they can resell or hold onto as a hedge against inflation.

“You’ve got to keep in mind,” says Konrad, “our business is not dependent upon quantities of bodies. We’re not a coffee shop. It depends on the size of the sale. A good day could be two sales. A bad day could be twenty sales.” This is especially true considering the rarity of some of the coins in stock, including the most expensive item in his store, a three-dollar coin minted in 1854 in Dahlonega, Georgia, that carries a price tag of $47,000.

Konrad talks with some understandable pride about this item or about the Officer’s Commissions from a Civil War-era soldier that he keeps framed as wall art in his office, but there is a hint of wonder around the edges. Even he seems a little amazed at how far he has come since riding his bike around his hometown of Walla Walla asking the people on his paper route if they had old coins to sell. It is that same sense of childlike joy at collecting, Konrad says, that has helped sustain him these past forty-eight years as a businessman.

“It’s very much like when I was a kid. You did the stuff you could with change. But when you become an adult, particularly when you get into your fifties and sixties and older and you have much more money, you renew your childhood hobbies and you spend lots of money on them.”

The Stamp & Coin Shop

725 Pike Street #6, Seattle
206.624.1400
Monday & Saturday, 10am–4pm;
Tuesday through Friday, 10am–6pm
stamp-coin.com