"Two, it's something that you can take out of your pocket that becomes a commemorative souvenir from a place you've visited." "The allure is probably a few things," says John Cweiber,co-founder and senior manager of The Penny Men, which sells its penny-smashing machines and more through "One, it still appeals to several people who enjoy the hunt," Cweiber says, noting the company's 1,300-plus machines. Online coin club The Elongated Collectors (has a roster of 628 dues-paying members. An eBay search at press time found upward of 500 listings for stretched coins and related ephemera. Fourteen separate Yahoo! newsgroups are devoted to various aspects of elongates, and eBay hosts a steady stream of pressed penny auctions. Today, Rosato says, thousands collect stretched pennies from worldwide locations. Prior to 1976, it was strictly a hobby and there was a couple hundred collectors in the country," he says. Since 1990, Rosato says, he can't keep track of the explosion of new designs. Rosato's work serves as a continuation of Dottie Dow's 19 books on elongates. "Now, it's unbelievable it's crazy," says Rosato, a former jeweler who spent 22 years writing the 1,760-page tome "Encyclopedia of the Modern Elongates."
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