The Princeton University Numismatic Collection is one of only a handful of academic coin collections in the United States. In addition to serving the needs of students, faculty and researchers in a number of departments, it is available to the general public through exhibitions, the online database, and by appointment with the curator. 

The earliest record of a numismatic collection at Princeton goes back to 1849, when friends of the (then) College of New Jersey bought and donated a collection of plaster casts (“sulfurets”) of Greek and Roman coins, formerly the property of Lord Vernon. The Princeton University Numismatic Collection is thus the oldest continually curated public numismatic collection in the United States. For a succinct account of the collection’s history, see B. Levy and P. Bastien, Roman Coins in the Princeton University Library I (Wetteren, 1985), pp.xi-xii, and B. Levy and A. Stahl, "Princeton University Library," Compte Rendu of the International Numismatic Commission, 51 (2004), 20-25.

The Numismatic Collection contains about 115,000 items (we'll know more exactly when the ongoing cataloguing is completed), including coins, paper money, tokens, medals and decorations from the earliest period to the present. While the basic collection has always been housed in the University's Library (since 1948 the Firestone Library), other collections have been combined with it over the years, including those of the Princeton University Art Museum, the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and the University Archives.