On the third floor of an unassuming downtown corporate building wedged between a denture care center and a consulting firm is a gold mine of political memorabilia.
Capitol Coin, which opened in 1979, buys and sells collectors items, like specialty coins, silver and gold, rare signed photographs, antique bills and political memorabilia, like posters, buttons and presidential pens used to sign bills. Nelson Whitman, the owner of the store since it opened, said the shop is similar to other D.C. institutions, like museums, due to its strong presence and preservation of political history — but here, it’s all for sale.
“People come in and see it all and I say, ‘Well, it’s all for sale,'” Whitman said. “A museum, but it’s not to look at, you can buy anything in here.”
Every inch of the shoebox store is packed with relics of America’s political, cultural and economic past. Glass cases gleam with coins dating back to the first century B.C., binders brimming with presidential campaign buttons for everyone from William McKinley to Donald Trump teeter on packed shelves, a wall of oversized pre-1929 dollar bills towers over visitors and signed photographs of political icons sit in frames lining the walls. Whitman moves with a knowing ease through the shop, after having moved with it around D.C. seven times and having been in the current location since last year, his tall frame bent slightly to tending to the treasures he’s spent a lifetime collecting. Whitman said he appreciates that even as the years go on, young clientele still flow into the store.
“There’ll always be people coming in to buy stuff,” he said. “I mean, I get a lot of younger people coming in to buy.”
Whitman said he sources the majority of his inventory from customers who visit the store looking to sell personal mementos, some passed down from family, others given by the federal government as gifts and souvenirs of various administrations. He said some customers come in with extremely valuable items, but most are selling “pretty common stuff,” which he takes but often gives away to kids for school projects rather than reselling.
“Mainly people who don’t have any interest in collecting would rather have the money than have stuff sitting there and not doing anything,” Whitman said.
Whitman said the store has changed location seven times in the past 45 years. He said when there were other collection shops still in existence in the 1970s, he’d collaborate with them by sending customers back and forth to different dealers to find the item they wanted. He said he believes Capitol Coin has endured because his honesty and patience with customers has garnered their respect.

“If you’re honest with people, they’ll respect you,” Whitman said.
Whitman said his love of gathering odd items came from his youth when he collected “everything,” but especially coins.
“I always had a love for collecting,” he said.
Whitman said growing up, all of his friends collected, and they’d trade coins with each other. He said his mom would give him a weekly allowance, and he used it primarily to buy coins to fill his collection.
He said although he’s loved collecting his whole life, he decided to make it his life’s work after a year at Duquesne University Kline School of Law convinced him the legal field wasn’t for him.
“Studying all the law books just didn’t have any meaning for me,” Whitman said. “That was a turning point for me.”
He said he took a job working in the now-defunct Woodward & Lothrop department store in Pittsburgh and moved to D.C. in 1963 after being offered the chance to run the coin department at the store. When the department went under in 1979, Whitman used the experience selling coins to create Capitol Coin.
Whitman said that once he opened the store and started collecting for business, he stopped adding to his personal collection because he would be too tempted to “collect all the good stuff” that comes into the store.
“It’s hard to really fall in love with something if you have it up to sell,” Whitman said.
Whitman said his favorite thing in the store is a photograph marking the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — signed by the former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev. He said someone who knew Gorbachev brought the photograph into the store to sell before returning to Russia.
“Autograph stuff is important to me because I enjoy that type of merchandise,” Whitman said. “I’ve got autographs from presidents and so on, which I kind of have more respect for than just regular stuff because it’s one of a kind.”
Whitman said political events like elections and the inauguration often drive extra interest in items related to those occurrences.
“Every four years there’s more interest in campaign stuff than every two years when there’s congressional campaigns,” he said.
Case in point, a set of Trump-Vance inauguration invitations in Whitman’s store already sold this week, according to his website. The pins that still line his walls include everything from a button declaring that Hillary Clinton would turn Georgia blue in 2016 to a $675 button for Teddy Roosevelt’s 1904 campaign. Nearby are a gold paper weight with Richard Nixon’s face on it, a letter from William Howard Taft about cartridge shells and a stuffed animal of Joe Biden’s snappy dog, Commander.

Several D.C. luminaries have stopped by his store over the years, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who shopped around with a pack of Secret Service agents to buy a stamp book for her daughter, and Johnny Cash, who came in looking to invest in silver and left with a 100-ounce bar.
Whitman said he has a “photographic memory” of prices, allowing him to easily appraise items. But if he’s unsure of an item’s worth, he said he consults books that list the current prices for items like coins. He said his expertise comes from decades of experience.
“I’ve been doing this for 65 years, you get to know what prices are,” Whitman said.
Whitman said he refuses to sell items for people to invest in and resell for profit, preferring to sell just for the joy of “the old hobby.”
“If people come and say ‘what should I buy to invest in?,’ I say, ‘I don’t sell anything to invest, you like it, you buy it to collect it,’” Whitman said.
At 88 years old, Whitman said his family has been pushing him to retire, but he’s determined to stay in the collecting game for as long as possible — he said it’s what keeps him feeling young.
“If I retire, I can’t sit at home and watch TV. I’ll die in a week,” Whitman said.