ERIC JENSEN INTERVIEW, PART ONE

I was honored to meet and interview Eric Jensen this last year about his extraordinary work – and unpaid volunteer work I might add – extensively documenting Canadian exonumia. Eric is a Canadian archivist who has thoroughly documented multiple major collections in Canada. Then, rather than sell the product of his labors, he puts all of this information online for the benefit of collectors.

He has been working without fanfare or attention and through this interview I would like very much to shine some light his way. We put particular focus throughout the interview on the Canadian material he has cataloged and explored his selfless work and extraordinary patience amidst an ongoing labor of love.

He has created an absolutely invaluable treasure trove of information for numismatists to refer to and from which their numismatic education can fully blossom. In a recently lecture I gave on counterstamps at the University of Calgary, I referred to Eric as "a Canadian numismatic hero" and made sure to repeat the sentiment multiple times because it is very true.

Anyone interested in Canadian exonumia will find much to learn on his website: https://cnr-rnc.ca/jensen_eric/

Eric Jensen
You'll notice I use the term "countermark" rather than counterstamp.

Greg Bennick
Yes…I actually did notice that. Can you tell me more why that is the case?

 

Eric Jensen
Chris Faulkner [Canadian coin researcher and author of The Holey Dollars and Dumps of Prince Edward Island] made a very good point. And he said a counterstamp is the tool that makes the stamp but you are countermarking something. I kind of waffled between the two, and then I said to James Williston [Canadian collector who owns numismatic material archived by Eric Jensen] one day, because he was very interested in collecting various kinds of exonumia which was marked and not stamped, "Let's call them countermarks," as that includes every kind of marked token or coin, even those not actually stamped.

Greg Bennick
This is because the word "mark" includes everything. How did you get your start in all of this? With coins, and with the work you do?

Eric Jensen
Like you, I started as a teenager. A friend introduced me to coin collecting, and I started collecting Canadian decimal coinage. This was a poor man's collection, built from whatever I could find in circulation and trading, and so on and so forth. I went through right up until the Hunt Brothers and the big silver crunch. I sold off my spare silver to friends because the value was up so much and then I kind of got away from it. Everything was getting a little more expensive than I would want to take from the family budget to support my silly hobby. So that is when I started looking for varieties.

From a collecting viewpoint, when silver took off, and because the mint stuff started to go a little bit silly with their non-numismatic items, it was a lot more fun to switch over to varieties. I collected them for a long time. Then in the early 1980's, I met a fellow when we were out metal detecting, an elderly gentleman, Alfred Wrigley, who was just a wonderful individual. We became friends, and we went to a metal detecting meeting. One guy was doing show and tell. He had a jar full of coins, and he was rattling it to show people. I cringed, and the fellow beside me turned to me and he said, "Coin collector, eh?" (laughs)

 

So, we became really, really good friends, and he started what he called "Hobby Helpers," which was a low-end mail order business where he would sell scrip for fifteen cents. That was when mailing costs were low. So, we got involved in that. He came to me, and said, "Nobody's done catalog on Alberta medallions. I only know of about 75 people collecting them, and there's maybe only 90…"

"But," he said, "you're good with a computer. Would you mind helping me out and cataloguing them?" And I said that I would be happy to help. I made up some standard sheets with a program that I was quite happy to try and use to get it all set up. We started into it and put out the first edition of Alberta Medallions in 1986 and then by 1989 when we're up into the hundreds of new additions, he said, "I think we need another edition." I did that, and this was back in the day and age where I did the computer work to put the basics down, but it was the old cut and paste. It was scissors and trips to Staples to do the photocopying.

That's when we actually sold the book Alberta Medallions. I kept working on this. It was just so darn much fun. I didn't mind doing it but it kept growing and growing and growing. And if I look back now at the work I did back then, I just shudder due to some of the quality of it all, because I was a rookie with this stuff.

About the Interviewer
Greg Bennick (www.gregbennick.com) is a keynote speaker and long time coin collector with a focus on major mint error coins and US counterstamps. He is on the board of both CONECA and TAMS and enjoys having in-depth conversations with prominent numismatists from all areas of the hobby. Have ideas for other interviewees? Contact him anytime via instagram @minterrors. He can also be reached by email at minterrors@gmail.com.

   

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