I have started to organise my circulated world coins by country in album sheets, possibly in a cardboard holder, I haven't decided yet. Some of the coins have been in bags and boxes for 50 years, never cleaned. I collected them when travelling and got from other people whom have traveled so they are just general circulation, not much collector value coins. My purpose is to make them available for display and "entertain" friends.
So cleaning them is one i have thought and come to a decision not to touch them. I look at it from this point; the coins represent buzzing life that has halted when I put the coin in my storage, it no longer move or do what it is designed to do; being handed from person to person, paying for goods and services, so every molecule on the surface of the coin has a history. Who knows how many of them have been handled by famous people, even Kings and Queens.
I was considering to bathe them in acetone to remove that black gunk that gets stuck in crevasses of the surface but I might remove the fingerprint and DNA of The Pope... What do you think? what would you do?
The fingerprints would be etched onto the coins by now, so there is no way you would remove them, but yes, you might remove some DNA. Personally, my world coins go into 2x2s exactly as I receive them. Sometimes I will attempt to remove green stuff, but that is all.
Hello,
If you dont clean them now, you can always do it later. You cant put the " charactor " back though.
Coiny Chris has put the finger on the main reason why coin collectors tend to say "Don't clean coins". Cleaning a coin is non-reversible; you can't "dis-clean" the coin back again if you decide you preferred the way it looked before you tried to clean it.
For myself, I don't clean a coin unless there's some reason it deserves it - like green sticky PVC goo, old stickytape or corrosion. It's got to be some feature that makes me think "whatever the coin looks like after I clean it, it can't possibly look worse than it does now".