From 1979, I entered a new phase of coin collecting. Anomalously, the pre-decimal sixpence still circulated and was accepted as two-and-a-half decimal pence. It had been saved by the public's affection for it, but by 1979 that affection no longer existed, and the government announced it ws to be demonetised from 1980. As a university student by this time, this sparked my interest, so I made sure to retain a few of the variations of the sixpences still in circulation.
After that, I discovered the now defunct "Coin Monthly" magazine, and was surprised to see adverts for sets from exotic sounding places such as the Cayman Islands and Papua New Guinea. For my birthday that year, my parents bought me Krause-Mishler's "Standard Catalog of World Coins", so I was able to see illustrations of these exotic designs. I was stunned by the beauty of many of the wildlife designs, and this recalled my childhood enthusiasm for wren farthing and the Irish barnyard series. Yet another surprise was to see how many of these coins carried QEII's effigy on their obverse, so there was a connection with my home country and another theme for me to collect. As an impecunious student, I now nervously set about ordering some of these sets from mail order coin dealers for the first time, worried that I might be scammed - though I never was.
My first aim was to collect all the current beautiful circulation wildlife designs I could get my hands on. After that, in the 1990s, my attention turned to pre-decimal Commonwealth/Empire coins of QEII and GVI's reigns, but whose designs may or may not have included realistic wildlife themes: Ceylon (GVI and one QEII design), Cyprus (GVI), India (GVI) and Malaya (GVI and QEII) largely didn't; Southern Rhodesia, Rhodesia and Nyasaland, Mauritius, Australia, New Zealand, etc., did include some (remember, I am talking *pre-decimal* coins here, though I also collected the *current* decimal coins of these states or their successor states). In the 1980s I went to a lot of coin fairs, but that petered out as I gathered up most of my "wants".
I also collected some wartime issues, such as the Nazi Germany set, the Fascist Italy set, the Slovakian "clerical-fascist" set, the Fascist-Occupied Albania set, plus some odds and ends from Vichy France and wartime Serbia and Croatia. I also have some superb designs from 1920s and 1930s Danzig, and just wish I could afford to own Danzig's highest denominations.
By the beginning of the 1990s, I had purchased virtually all the historical stuff I wanted, but by now communism had collapsed and attractive new sets were emerging from Croatia, Slovakia, Macedonia, Russia, etc.
You'll see from my posts that I'm mainly interested in modern thematic, representational designs on circulation coins (wildlife, ships, architecture), but I do deviate from that and occasionally buy "trinkets", as I call them, (medal coins, pseudo-coins, tokens), if their designs interest me.