Grove Coin, Woodbury

Photo: Tate Carlson

Paul Runze, owner of Grove Coin, in his office in the Collector's Gallery at Tamarack Village.

“I got into coin collecting when I was a kid,” says Paul Runze, numismatist, as we sit in the Grove Coin office (located in the back room of one of his other businesses, Collector’s Gallery) with mountains of coin-filled plastic sleeves and stacks of coin boxes covering his large desk. “I think the collector mentality is either in you or it isn’t; I guess I definitely have it.”

Runze, who also collected stamps as a kid to “learn about the world,” left his job as an architect in his twenties to pursue his love of coins (and collecting) full time. He joined coin clubs and attended coin shows. He did his research and built his inventory. He opened his first shop in Cottage Grove in 1973; Collector’s Gallery, which offers everything collectible from Swarovski crystals to Pandora to Vera Bradley, came in 1981.

“There’s no end to what you could talk about with coins,” he says excitedly, “so I guess it’s the history, and what the coins represent that make them so appealing.”

And the kinds of coins that Runze finds extremely appealing are those rare, hard-to-find pieces; his specialty, his niche, is exotic, early coins made by famous people in the last 2,500 or so years.

“I have coins in stock that were made by Julius Caesar, Charlemegne, Alexander the Great and Alfred the Great,” he says. ”They each have a story, and served a purpose; back then the coins were used to commemorate things. If an emperor wanted to tell the people that he just conquered an adjacent country, he would put a design on the back of a coin using an allegorical figure showing him subjugating some type of people, and that’s the way he reminded people he was a powerful guy.”

His own personal collection consists of coins of early England—he traced his roots back to an area near London—and he has made it his mission to find coins that bear the portrait of each ruler who ruled the island of Britain for the last 2,000 years. He’s always on the hunt for his own personal “holy grail,” an almost non-existent coin from King Eadwig’s reign. “It’s a silver coin about the size of a dime and made about the year 930,” he says. “The odds are slim that I’ll ever get one, but it’s sort of my dream.”

Rare coins are his passion, sure, but the bulk of his business is buying and selling of gold and silver and not-so-rare coins; he also handles other metals including copper and palladium, and items like tokens and medals.

“If people want to put their money into something that will appreciate, like gold or silver bar or coins, or liquidate the coins that their grandpa left them, that’s what we’re here for,” says Runz. “I like to tell them I’m not a coin dealer, I’m an adoption agency; I find new homes for coins so they can be appreciated.”

Runze, who is known for his fair dealings and competitive pricing—Grove Coin came out on top in a local secret shopping article—encourages people to do their research before selling or buying any precious metal or coins; he will gladly provide estimates over the phone. Not surprisingly, he’s always willing to talk, and educate folks on just how cool coins can be.

“I just love it when a guy comes in with his ten-year-old and I start talking and planting some seeds,” he says. “I’ll give him a handful of foreign coins and challenge him to come back in a month and tell me a couple things about the coins. It teaches how to do research, how to appreciate history, things like that, and I think everybody could use a little bit of that.” 

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