All About Coins
“The only difference between a hoarder and a collector is the level of organization – because both have the same amount of stuff,” Sarah Campbell says with a laugh. At All About Coins, collecting is most definitely a family trait, one that began with Sarah’s father, Harold Robert “Bob” Campbell III. It was a way for Bob to connect with his father, the owner of Arcade Jewelers who had passed away when Bob was just four and a half years old.
Years later, Bob discovered a box of coins beneath his parents’ bed and tried to learn everything he could about them. By age twelve, in the early 1970s, his curiosity had taken him to Wally’s Coin Shop, in the same location where All About Coins stands today. Wally recognized something in the young collector. Bob was hungry for information, and Wally gave him small jobs around the shop while teaching him about coins. After returning from a mission in 1980, Bob went to work for Wally. Three years later, at just twenty-five, he purchased the business.
Bob had grown up with his Finnish mother in a community filled with immigrant families from around the world. Sarah believes that experience shaped her father’s lifelong curiosity about people and places. He will talk to anyone, she says, and invariably wants to know where they are from. It is a fitting quality for someone who has spent his life surrounded by objects that have traveled through countries, cultures, and centuries.
What Bob purchased from Wally was a small coin shop housed in a former alleyway that had been enclosed in the 1950s. Over the decades, Bob steadily expanded its inventory, knowledge, and reputation. When the neighboring karate studio closed, the Campbell family broke through the wall and took over the adjoining space. What once held perhaps a few hundred thousand coins now holds millions.
The shop has always been a family operation. Sarah’s mother kept the books for years, her younger brother works there, and cousins, aunts, and uncles have all pitched in. Sarah grew up in the shop, eventually leaving to attend BYU-Idaho where she graduated in 2008 with a degree in horticulture and minors in history and animal science. She worked in greenhouses, floral shops, garden centers, and trained horses before returning more permanently to the family business.
By then, Sarah had discovered that while she appreciated coins, her own collecting passion lay elsewhere – jewelry. Today she manages the jewelry department in a room named Arcade Jewelers, an homage to the grandfather she never knew and the business he once owned.
For Sarah, old jewelry is about far more than its monetary value. She is fascinated by pieces that may have been purchased in Europe or elsewhere in the world before somehow making their way to Salt Lake and into her hands. Some are one of a kind and may never be seen again. Rather than melt down something damaged or unwanted, she will repair it, reimagine it, save its stones, or preserve whatever she can.
“I feel like I’m almost adopting the jewelry pieces out – like they’re rescue jewelry. I’m obsessed with preserving the beauty of the past and the memories.” She has been known to spend far more restoring something than it may ultimately be worth. “I feel it’s almost a duty that I should try to preserve it, try to fix it, try to make it live again in any way I can.”
There is plenty of history to preserve throughout All About Coins. Ancient coins date to the time of Christ and hundreds of years earlier, while other cases contain pieces spanning American history. There are U.S. coins and currency, territorial currency, gold and silver bullion from around the world, military items, proof and mint sets, and coins ranging from inexpensive pieces for beginning collectors to rarities worth thousands of dollars.
And then there is everything one might not expect to find in a coin shop – meteorites, glass created by lightning strikes, crystals, antique bottles with an emphasis on Utah finds, Native American jewelry, gold nuggets, books, collecting supplies, and an extensive assortment of counterfeit coins used for teaching identification.
That last category reflects another important part of the Campbell family’s work. Bob’s expertise has taken him far beyond the shop. At forty-one, he became the youngest president of the American Numismatic Association, serving for two years, and Sarah says he has received hundreds, if not thousands, of awards and recognitions throughout his career. His knowledge of coins and counterfeit identification has also brought representatives from government agencies through the doors – the FBI, CIA, GSA, and, as Sarah puts it, “all the alphabet groups of government” – to learn from the expertise developed here.
Education remains an important part of the business. Sarah encourages people who inherit coins or become interested in collecting them to begin with reputable books and learn what they have. Rarity can come down to a year, mint mark, or tiny detail that a newcomer might easily overlook, and counterfeit pieces have become increasingly sophisticated. The staff is there not simply to buy and sell, but to help people understand what they are looking at.
More than fifty years have passed since a curious twelve-year-old first walked into Wally’s looking for answers. Today, the space he purchased has grown into one of Utah’s premier destinations for numismatics, filled with millions of coins and a family that continues to collect, study, preserve, and share what it knows. “It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old. Just buy what you like – buy what makes you happy. Start wherever you want. Just be happy with your hobby.”
