Innehållsförteckning för January 2019 från Coins

I have before me a massive guide book entitled A Guide Book of Liberty Seated Silver Coins. As the title indicates, the subject is Liberty Seated silver coins, which encompasses a variety of different series of varying lengths. Like many of the volumes in Whitman’s Official Red Book series, Q. David Bowers is the author. Bowers has been involved with numismatics since his teen years more than 65 years ago, and as this book attests, he’s still going strong. Among his many honors, Bowers received the American Numismatic Association’s highest award, the Farran Zerbe Award. He’s also a member of the Numismatic Hall of Fame and the author of more than 50 books. When this book was published (2016), Bowers was the numismatic director of Whitman Publishing and chairman emeritus…

HOW DO you feel about the lowly cent? Is it a coin you have so little use for that you won’t stoop to pluck one from the ground? After all, a cent by itself won’t buy anything anymore, and I suspect most people just throw any they acquire into a large jar as soon as they get home. Should the U.S. continue to mint billions of cents just to keep Mint employees active, or should the U.S. terminate a denomination that, for a good while now, costs more to produce than its face value? Of course, these are questions for the general public, not for the coin collector. Most coin collectors probably want to see the denomination continue, as it gives them more to collect. And that leads to another…

FROM THE beginning of our new coinage system in the 1790s, all the way up to the 1850s, the United States Mint did a fair job of producing one-cent coins. The first few years saw some extremely large copper pieces, and indeed, after a couple of years of production, the weight was reduced. But still, these earliest coppers earned the name “large cents.” Both their size and weight are impressive. Exit the large cent. By the middle of the 1850s, the system and economy that had enabled the Mint to produce large cents was undergoing serious pressure. From roughly the 1820s until the middle of the century, a quickly growing United States lived in what now gets called a deflationary economy, meaning goods and products often got cheaper from year…