Welcome to Franklin Mint Silver.com!

Your source for information, buying, and selling vintage Franklin Mint silver medals, ingots, and coins!

This site contains detailed information about Franklin Mint silver and gold collectible art medals, ingots, and coins, including descriptions, precious metal content, care and cleaning tips, pictures of many of the sets, and an online marketplace to buy and sell these sets.

NOTE: This website is about vintage Franklin Mint products, but WE ARE NOT AFFILIATED WITH THE FRANKLIN MINT. If you are looking for The Franklin Mint Store, please visit www.franklinmint.com.

Site Usage

The introductory pages of this site contain General information about Franklin Mint sets, silver and gold Weights, and Cleaning Tips. The Medals, Ingots, and Coins pages then list many of the individual Franklin Mint sets, and have links to individual pages that describe each set, with mintage information, original prices, pictures, and my comments on the set. The Other Mints page has similar information about selected sets from the Danbury Mint, Lincoln Mint, and Hamilton Mint. The Other Items page describes some non-medallic Franklin Mint items such as silver sculptures that may also be of interest to both bullion investors and collectors. There’s a lot of information here – see the Sitemap for a birds-eye view!

The Buy and Sell pages provide a marketplace for these sets - check it out! We have a large inventory of these sets for sale that were acquired over the years from various sources including coin shows, coin shops, Ebay, private transactions, and this website. Many of these items are exceedingly rare and are not available anywhere else. We also purchase such sets through this website; for a quick and easy price quote on items you are interested in selling, see the Sell page.

If you have general questions about Franklin Mint sets that we may be able to help with, or questions about buying or selling, you can contact us through the Contact page.

History

In the mid-1960's, the Franklin Mint popularized a new class of collectible - coins, art medals, and ingots minted in precious metals (silver, gold, and platinum) and marketed for both their artistic content and intrinsic worth. Most were sold by direct subscription with one or two new medals issued per month over a period of months or years. Typically, the Franklin Mint provided attractive packaging for the complete sets, ranging from picture frame type mounting to bookshelf albums to wooden display cases to elaborate multi-drawer chests for some of the larger sets. Many of the sets were minted in several sizes and in several metals, including most commonly in bronze, sterling silver, and gold-plated sterling silver, and rarely in pure gold or platinum. During its heyday of the 1970's, the Franklin Mint had many distinguished artists and sculptors creating the designs for the art medals, including notably Gilroy Roberts, former chief designer for the United States Mint. Superbly detailed designs coupled with Proof quality minting produced some works of art that could truly be considered museum or heirloom quality. Other private mints such as the Danbury Mint, Hamilton Mint, and Lincoln Mint also produced similar sets, but the Franklin Mint was by far the largest producer and created some of the most artistic and best quality items.

The original prices of these sets were based on both the artwork and precious metal content, and were typically much higher than the spot precious metals prices. For example, medals with one ounce of silver each might be priced at $15 when spot silver was $3/ounce. With the runup in silver and gold prices in 1979-1980, the market for new issues substantially diminshed because of increased prices. Even though silver and gold prices came down again in the early 1980's, very few new sets were produced later than the 1980's. Most of the sets that are available today were minted from the mid 1960's to the early 1980's, so there is today largely only a secondary market in these items. Because these sets typically sell based primarily on the precious metal value, they represent an attractive alternative to bullion coins or simple precious metal ingots because the artistic content and beautiful presentation endures but comes at a very small premium over the actual bullion value, which makes these sets a great value.

About

I have collected Franklin Mint and other private mint sets for almost 35 years, and at one time or another have owned the majority of the sets ever made. Buying new additions and selling older items through Ebay became part of the collecting process. I have bought and sold these sets on Ebay for over 20 years as big*bob. I sincerely hope that you find this site interesting and informative, whether for browsing, for reference information about a particular item, or for buying or selling. I am not aware of any other readily available source for this type of information. Enjoy! -- Bob Sheraga