Franklin Mint

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The Franklin Mint is a private corporation based in Exton, Pennsylvania which markets collectibles of its own designs. It was founded by Joseph Segel.

The company started by marketing privately-minted gold and silver commemorative rounds and medallions, but quickly branched out into other collectibles. In the 1960s the price of silver rose, causing all silver coins to be removed from circulation. The Nevada casinos used silver dollars in their slot machines, which were soon worth more than a dollar. The Franklin Mint was one of the earliest and largest minters of replacement slot machine tokens.

It minted in its own production facility numerous sets of coins-of-the-realm, theme-based medals and ingots, selling them on the subscription plan, with buyers getting a monthly shipment and invoice. Franklin Mint struck issues in all the different precious and semi-precious metals. American history and art masterpiece themes were predominant, with space and important persons and other topics also quite popular. Sets were often limited by the number of subscribers by a cut-off date, or a fixed mintage, resulting in "limited editions". Prices were fairly reasonable, compared to the cost of silver, and often tens of thousands of sets were sold. Custom wood cases, fancy packaging and certificates appealed to collectors, and the market boomed. However, silver prices climbed, making the cost of larger items high, and replacement bronze and pewter issues did not appeal to collectors as much.

From 1973 to 2000, the Franklin Mint had a division called the Franklin Library, which produced hundreds of editions of classic works of literature in fine bindings.

In 1980, Warner Communications (now part of Time Warner) purchased The Franklin Mint for about $225 million. The combination was short lived: Warner sold The Franklin Mint in 1985 to American Protection Industries Inc. (API) for $167.5 million. However, Warner retained Eastern Mountain Sports, a retailer that The Franklin Mint had acquired in the 1970s, as well as The Franklin Mint Center, which it leased back to API.^[1] API was renamed Roll International in 1993.

In 1983, and to much success, The Franklin Mint entered the die-cast car market with the 1935 Mercedes Benz 500K Roadster. In the following years, Franklin Mint produced numerous designs including the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of Franklin Mint's better-selling models. Collector knives, figurines, plates, Monopoly sets, chess sets and board games, plaques, coins, medals, and other collectibles have been issued over the years by The Franklin Mint.

The Franklin Mint was heavily reliant upon direct mail and media print ads for sales. Advertisements for Franklin Mint collectibles—including the Civil War Commemorative Chess Set among thousands of other items—were once ubiquitous in popular magazines.

Currently The Franklin Mint has divested itself of minting capacity, and has downsized, and is now mostly a producer/marketer of diecast models. On October 17, 2006 The Franklin Mint announced it was sold by Roll International Corp to a number of private investors including M. Moshe Malamud and Steven Sisskind, chairman and chief executive respectively from The Morgan Mint, and David Salzman, a Hollywood producer. The sale closed on August 31, 2006 and no price was announced. The new ownership plans to return Franklin Mint to its former market-leading status and offer the full lineup of collectibles including coins and medallics.

Many of the Franklin Mint's most recent Resnick era products were pop-culture icon themed, for example porcelain plates featuring images of John Wayne among many others.

In March 2007, The Franklin Mint announced that it has managed to recover much of the prized treasure from an 18th century ship lost at sea. El Cazador, which means 'the hunter' in Spanish, sunk in 1784 on its way to the Spanish-controlled Louisiana to provide pecuniary support to the economy. As well as containing 450,000 pesos of silver coins, El Cazador also contained a host of other artefacts such as so-called 'dead man's gold' and ammunition.

With the ship having only been discovered in 1993, the Franklin Mint will offer up the collection, estimated to be worth $100 million (£51.3 million), to the US public. Describing the finding of El Cazador as "one of the most profound discoveries of our time", Moshe Malamud, chairman of the Franklin Mint, said the group was making it possible for the "public to own a highly coveted and valuable piece of history". He added: "There is no question that the historical significance and value of the coins recovered from El Cazador have earned her a place alongside the most famous shipwrecks of all-time such as the Atocha and SS Republic."

It is believed that the sinking of El Cazador was intrinsic to the development of the modern US, with the Spanish having to sell their territories to Napoleon, who later sold them to Thomas Jefferson

1 Resources
2 Footnotes
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Resources

Guidebook of Franklin Mint Issues by Chester L. Krause, Krause Publications (various editions, 1978). This book lists all issues of the mint, with mintages, original price and then current retail value. The Franklin Mint also issued annual printed lists of items issued that year in The Franklin Mint Almanac. All are out of print.