ERIC JENSEN INTERVIEW, PART TWO

Well, when Alfred passed away, I got his collection of the Alberta medallions, and it's, of course, the world's best collection of Alberta medallions, because not too many people collect them. I think I'm up over 4200 or so that I've listed. I got into ones that I said I wouldn't. I got into the sports ones, which you can see on that tremendous resource, the Canadian Numismatic Resources website. When they started that I finally had a place where I could put the information, where I didn't have to spend so long in Staples, photocopying, endlessly, putting it all into binders, and then trying to distribute it.

When Alfred had his mail order business, he would mail the listings off. But I had nothing like that. So, the stuff basically just was sitting there, and it was getting tougher and tougher to do books, and that's why I decided to do it electronically. The first thing I did was the Alberta tokens. I collected Alberta tokens, and I knew four others who were really serious about it, so I started to do it too. I would borrow their collections, and said that I was only doing going to create a spreadsheet. I'm said that I wasn't going to do images. It was just too difficult. This was the worst mistake I ever made in this whole exercise, because later, I got little better at taking photos with better cameras. Early on though, the cameras were very low quality. Very low megabytes. I never was happy with them, but that's what I used. Or if need be, I did rubbings, because I was actually pretty good at doing coin rubbings.

Greg Bennick
Creating coin rubbings is truly a lost art.

Eric Jensen
Yes. It's a lost art, and if you look at Don Stewart's book, the rubbings are clearer than any picture I could ever take, but you can't zoom into the real detail. You really can't, though they're great images. Right now, if anything is handed to me, I don't care what it is – whether it's in one of my friend collections or another - I take pictures of it for a catalog. I find a place for it. When I got the Alberta tokens done, it was well-received. The collectors had all printed it out. It was small enough that you could print it out. When I got into shopping cart tokens, people would laugh at me and say, "Why would you catalog those?" I said, "Well, they're good for good for getting a carton. Some of them all actually say 25 cents on it and all kinds of different things." I came up with numbering systems for them.

Greg Bennick
And the domain is the website once again is...

Eric Jensen
The website is, Canadian Numismatics Resources, CNR-rnc.ca. That is the French version and my specific page for my various cataloguing projects is here: https://cnr-rnc.ca/jensen_eric/.

For me, it's so important to get the information out there. Many numismatic books that get out there on these subjects, are extremely hard to find. But for the people and collectors, this way the digital information is always there. Do we all like books? Yes, but printing out all of this information – the BC material for example - is over 1250 pages or something like that. That's a lot of printing.

Greg Bennick
Absolutely. It makes sense to go digital with all of this, especially if the goal is easier access for collectors, which I know it is.

Eric Jensen
I had a friend Len Booth down in London, Ontario. He became my number one mentor. He is the one who encouraged me to do so many things. He was into encased coins, which, you know, the encased and the spinners and their perpetual calendars, and also the pocket mirror cards, were beautiful. They often had advertising on them. Some are fancy. Some are plain. They are celluloid so they some of them crack, and you don't want to light a match to them. They can burn pretty quick.

Greg Bennick
Let's make mention of what spinners are too, because people might not know.

Eric Jensen
A spinner is usually made of brass, and sometimes other metals. On one side it'll have an arrow pointing in a certain direction, and it usually says something like "you pay or you win." On the other side is advertising of some sort. The idea was, say you're in the bar and you give this thing a spin, whoever it points to buys the next drink. Well, after a few spins, who cares (laughs), but they're a great advertising piece. There are still a few modern ones done, but not like there was. So, Len asked if this stuff was worth cataloging and I said, "Absolutely." He started to send me scans, and I used my standard format, and I started to put the spinners and cases and perpetual calendars in a catalog.

I started this, and then these other collectors decided that this was a not too bad an idea, and thought that maybe I wouldn't mind adding their collections as well. So I did. I started adding them in, and I was extremely fortunate that for those who weren't able to send me scans, which was actually most of them, they would give me their entire collections. It didn't matter how many thousands of dollars this stuff was worth.

I did this with the Alberta tokens and the thing with the Alberta tokens is I had access to probably the five best collections that existed. Right now, I probably couldn't access many of those, because the individuals are gone. They would loan me their collections just in two-by-two boxes, and I would take them out. I'd photograph both sides, or perhaps just a single side if it was uniface, and I would put it in the Alberta token digital version that you can now see on the website.

Greg Bennick
How many pieces total have you catalogued?

Eric Jensen
Oh, gosh. Many thousands. I started doing it for everybody, and that's about the point in time that collections, as people got older, started to change places too. The stuff was starting to disappear, but I had it captured. I love that it inspires interest in people. I did printed copies for certain individuals. Even though it was lot of paper, I knew that they weren't on the computer, so I made paper copies to them. That, to me, was the biggest thing. It was the fact that some of these guys who had boxes just put away and then loaned them to me were seeing things they hadn't seen for years.

Greg Bennick
From their own collections?

Eric Jensen
From their own collections, and all great stuff. This is my way of paying back to the hobby that's been so good to me, just the fun of collecting and the people you meet. I'm not a big-time writer. I write small articles for a few little publications, but it's certainly not to the extent that other guys do. So my goal is to capture images of everything I can before it disappears. I've been extremely fortunate, like I said, with the people that brought it all forward. The big thing to me is to get the information out there.

Greg Bennick
So, my understanding from what you've said is that you collected or still collect Alberta medals?

Eric Jensen
I collect Alberta medallions, and when I got done with the ones that I mentioned including Alberta tokens and cased spinners, pocket mirrors, and perpetual calendars, I had a fellow come to me and say that his daughter had just retired. He was a well-known numismatist, and he was very interested in getting her involved. He got her involved collecting love tokens. He asked me if there was any chance sometime in the future, if I could catalog these.

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.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
ERIC JENSEN INTERVIEW, PART ONE (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n28a12.html)

   

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