Coin Album NUMIS, with 5 pocket sheets, green

Every collection needs a first proper home, and most of them deserve a better one than a drawer.

The NUMIS is a coin album built on a four-ring binder of hard-wearing synthetic, finished in green with silver embossing on the lid and spine. It arrives already useful: a set of pocket sheets in mixed formats — the NH44, NH34, NH25, NH17 and an NH MIX — so a collection of assorted coin sizes has somewhere to go from day one, plus white interleaves between the pages and a printed title sheet to start things off properly. It measures a manageable 215 by 230 by 48mm.

It is the green that catches him, naturally. It is very nearly the green of the dashboard in his old Jaguar — that deep, slightly enamelled British green that looks black until the light finds it and then quietly glows. He has a weakness for the colour that borders on the irrational; it suggests, to him, a certain unhurried seriousness, the green of instrument panels and reading lamps and things built before plastic learned to shout. A collection kept in this colour somehow feels like it is being taken seriously, which is half the battle.

The mixed sheets mean you can begin tonight, whatever odd sizes you have been hoarding.

A collection should not feel accidental, and an album is where it stops being so.