Coin dealers and collectors still haven’t reached a consensus about the new premium-quality designation

by Dom Yanchunas

The Coinage of Massachusetts

All of the known dies have been carefully cataloged, but it is still possible to make an interesting new discovery in the series

by R.W. Julian

Coin Capsule: 1773

The original Tea Party took place in Boston, and colonists didn’t hesitate to use the George III Virginia halfpence

by John Iddings

Lovett & Sons

Robert Lovett Sr. and his sons made up a dynasty of engravers and die sinkers whose work spanned the 19th century

by David T. Alexander

“Slabs” Then and Now

Once simple coin holders in the 1960s, slabs today are a sort of security device, but they’re still not completely problem-free

by Tom DeLorey

Presidential Dollars: James Buchanan

Hoping that the Dred Scott decision would settle the slavery issue, the always formal Buchanan never confronted secession

by Ron Meyer

Money of British Monarchs: The Coinage of Edward VIII

The saga of Edward and Wallis Simpson makes his surviving coins that much more interesting and desirable

by R.W. Julian

Proper Bostonians

Boston has been a center of intellectual activity throughout American history and the foundation of many important numismatic advances

by David T. Alexander

People are already weighing in on the new supersize grading scale. What’s their reaction so far?

by Dom Yanchunas

America’s 10 Most Wanted Coins

With the revival of the Sacagawea dollar, it seems appropriate to dedicate this year’s list to coins that feature Native Americans

by Ed Reiter

The 10 “Biggest Losers”

Some of the worst ideas in U.S. coinage history are also some of the most collectible coins today

by David T. Alexander

Redesign Hits the C-Note

The new $100 bill incorporates some high-tech security features in an effort to further discourage counterfeiters

by Ron Meyer

How Did That Leave the Mint?

Many stunning coins have left the various U.S. mints under indefinite circumstances over the years

by Tom DeLorey

Coin Capsule: 1935

It was the final year of production for the Peace dollar, but events in Europe were moving closer to war

by Tom Toolen

COINage Contributing Editor presents Beth Deisher with an award from the Numismatic Literary Guild. Deisher won this year's Zerbe Award.

AWARD TO THE WISE
by Ed Reiter

The American Numismatic Association chose wisely and well in selecting Beth Deisher, editor of Coin World, to receive this year’s Farran Zerbe Award, the national coin club’s highest honor.

The Zerbe Award recognizes long and dedicated service to numismatics, and Beth meets that standard superbly. To some, though, her qualifications probably seemed more obvious afterward than beforehand. That’s because she’s so low-key about her contributions to the hobby.

Beth took the helm of Coin World, the hobby’s weekly newspaper of record, in 1985. It was a tumultuous time in the world of coins. Overgrading and overpricing were serious concerns. U.S. commemorative coinage had recently resumed, but major problems already were raising doubts about its future. And a movement was afoot to authorize U.S. gold and silver bullion coins, even as skeptics voiced grave reservations about the idea.

The challenge was formidable, but the new editor soon made it clear she was up to the job. Her straightforward manner, attention to detail and workaholic habits set very high standards for others on the staff.

Beth had joined the Coin World staff in 1981, working under the dynamic Margo Russell, who had been the paper’s high-profile editor since the early 1960s. When Margo retired, the daunting task of filling her shoes went to Beth.

Looking back today, it’s clear that both women have been enormous factors in Coin World’s development and success. And both have become extremely important figures in the hobby–as evidenced by the fact that collectors far and wide refer to both by just their first names.

In a number of ways, however, they’re a study in contrasts.

Margo, now 90, was a whirling dervish during her editing days. She was outgoing and effusive, and made many friends both within the hobby and at the U.S. Mint. Her entrée at the Mint built a useful new bridge between the federal government and the nation’s coin collectors. At one time, it is said, Margo was the single most influential person in the hobby.

While far from aloof, Beth is more reserved and more likely to be seen in professional–rather than social–settings, camera or notebook in hand as she takes copious photos or notes for yet another <i>Coin World</i> story. Like me, she comes from a journalistic background, and I sense that she shares my drive to get every detail just right in every story.

Beth took over at Coin World in 1985, the year before I became COINage senior editor. We have been friendly competitors for a quarter-century now, with strong emphasis on “friendly.”

Beth has led the way in giving hobby news a sharper focus and harder edge. She was in the forefront, for example, in exposing apparent transgressions by a high-ranking ANA official who eventually stepped down in the face of mounting outrage by many members.

In 1995, her testimony before a congressional subcommittee helped bring about reforms in U.S. commemorative coinage, which was suffering at the time from numerous abuses, including overproduction and inappropriate themes. She was also influential in gaining support in Washington for the 50 State Quarters® Program.

My admiration for Beth stems not from her ability to score important “scoops,” although she’s had plenty of those. Rather, it’s based on her impeccable judgment, firm commitment to fairness and unfailing professionalism in bringing every story to her readers.

Others might boast that their presentation of news is “fair and balanced”–but without any fanfare, Beth’s actions speak far more loudly than their often-empty words.

 Beth was characteristically modest when I sent my congratulations after learning of the award.

“I was astounded when ANA staff informed me,” she said in her e-mail reply.

The award came as no big surprise to me and many others. After decades of quiet excellence in covering hobby news, Beth Deisher richly deserved a headline affirming how vital she has been in putting that news in perspective for everyone else.

Good designs are, so far, few and far between in the America the Beautiful Quarters™ Program.

A CLASH OF SYMBOLS
by Ed Reiter

Symbolism.

To critics of the U.S. Mint’s uninspired coin designs, it’s an element sorely missing from the nation’s new coinage in recent years.

Members of both the federal Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC) have urged the Mint to return to the allegorical portraits of Liberty and other powerful symbols that graced the greatest U.S. coins of the past, such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ stunning double eagle and eagle.

To the U.S. Mint, however, “symbolism” seems to have a whole ’nother meaning. This hit me as I pondered the Mint’s curious claim of trademark protection for the phrase “America the Beautiful” as it pertains to the new Washington quarters honoring national parks and historic sites.

Mint officials have brandished this claim like a club, threatening to bludgeon any dealer or seller of supplies who dares to use the expression “America the Beautiful Quarters” in packaging and marketing the coins.

The only symbols that matter, from the Mint’s point of view–or so it would appear–are ™ and ®, the symbols for “Trademark” and “Registered Trademark.”

If this is the case, why not just stamp one of these symbols on each and every “America the Beautiful” quarter or similar insipid creation? It would be at least as artistic as the fancy outdoor bidet on the Hot Springs quarter or the high-rise molehill on the Grand Canyon coin.

While they’re at it, the crack Mint artists might consider labeling key elements of the designs, so people who get the coins can tell, for instance, which jagged lines are supposed to be mighty mountains and which flat spaces are limpid lakes. As things stand now, one bad design blends into the next like so many ramshackle buildings along Skid Row–hardly the beautiful America they’re intended to depict.

Good designs were few and far between in the 50 State Quarters® Program. The six quarters issued for the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories ranged from tolerable to terrible. But as we near the end of the first year of the America the Beautiful Quarters™ Program, it’s evident already that far from being an American Idol, this is the Biggest Loser.

Not one of the six coins issued or previewed so far is remotely beautiful. Ghastly, garish, god-awful, yes. But it’s hard to imagine any beholder whose eye would find beauty in these.

Come to think of it, there is one group that might find this “artwork” worth a closer look: archaeologists who study the scratchings on the walls of ancient caves.

Mint officials declined a request to be interviewed about the trademark issue. But in a written response, a spokesman told COINage that the Mint applies for trademarks to “protect the integrity and image of its intellectual property, build and enhance its brand identity, clearly distinguish its products from those of private mints and other businesses and identify itself as a component of the U.S. government.”

I’m having trouble figuring out just what “intellectual” has to do with this particular property. And given the dismal designs on recent U.S. coins, I can’t imagine why any private mint would want to be confused with Uncle Sam’s.

Perhaps the Mint’s ineptitude is, itself, a symbol. A sign that in modern society, the overwhelming emphasis is on meeting tight deadlines, not high standards. A sign that with so many different coin programs being authorized, some involving dozens of new issues, quantity is pushing quality out of the picture.

I guess that’s one big reason I view the trademark dispute with especially jaundiced eyes. At a time when it should be focused on creating better designs, the Mint is wasting time and effort playing legal chess games straight out of Alice in Wonderland.

Could it be that the Mint’s lawyers, rather than its artists, are the biggest culprits here? If they used fewer resources tilting at legal windmills, would the artists be more inspired to reach beyond the bland and the banal?

Whatever it is that led us to this unhappy pass, one thing’s undeniably true:

A mint is a terrible thing to waste.

But in this age of tweets and status updates, a bit of promotion is in order.

For the last almost 10 years, I’ve had the honor of working with some of the community’s best.

Best dealers.

Best readers.

Best writers.

OK, “best” is a bit subjective. But on the subject of the latter, it’s not.

Fact: For the last eight years, the Numismatic Literary Guild has given COINage numerous awards in various areas within our category.

Fact: This ninth year was no exception.

U.S. COMMERCIAL NUMISMATIC MAGAZINES
BEST ARTICLE OR SERIES OF ARTICLES
Tokens & Medals: “Benedetto Pistrucci,” David T. Alexander, COINage
Paper Money: “Signs of Progress,” Jon Blackwell, COINage

BEST COLUMN
“My Two Cents’ Worth,” Ed Reiter, COINage

BEST ISSUE
COINage, August 2009, Ed Reiter, Senior Editor; Marcy Gibbel, Managing Editor

So don’t just take my word for it.

The NLG is made up of our peers. Membership is open to “authors of numismatic books; publishers and editors of recognized numismatic periodicals or club publications in the numismatic field; staff writers or columnists of such periodicals; writers whose work has been published in such periodicals or club journals; published research numismatists; auction catalogers; curators of recognized numismatic museums; and others deemed worthy by the NLG Membership Committee.”

The NLG thinks COINage is (one of) the best, too, and for this, I am thankful.

It’s official: The Realm of Coins has a new heavyweight champion—with a seven-figure price tag to back its claim to the title.

A 2007 Canadian Maple Leaf containing 220.5 pounds of gold (that’s 100 kilograms to you metric-minded nerds) changed hands (or forklifts) for $4 million at an auction held in late June in Vienna, Austria. Put another way, it sold for 3.27 million euros.

That’s among the highest prices ever paid for a single coin. But most single coins are designed, of course, with people’s pockets—not flatbed trucks—in mind.

More to the point, the price appears to be an all-time record for a single bullion coin—for that’s how the auction bidders seem to have viewed this behemoth.

The coin is .9999 fine—essentially pure gold—and contains 2,646 troy ounces of gold. With the yellow metal trading for about $1,250 an ounce at the time of the sale, that translates into a bullion value of roughly $3.3 million.

Austria’s Dorotheum auction house, which conducted the sale, concluded–correctly, it appears–that bullion value, not rarity, was the primary motivation of the buyer, a Spanish precious-metal trading company called Oro Direct.

Dorotheum sold the coin as part of its liquidation of assets belonging to the previous owner, AvW Group, an Austrian investment firm that went bankrupt.

 The coin is 21 inches (53 centimeters) in diameter and 1.2 inches thick, carries a face value of 1 million Canadian dollars ($960,000 U.S.) and bears the same design as the regular 1-ounce Maple Leaf, with the standard coinage portrait of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II on the obverse and a (very large) likeness of the maple leaf, Canada’s national symbol, on the reverse.

Why make a coin weighing more than a tenth of a ton? As a pocket piece for Paul Bunyan … a teething ring for Godzilla?

It was produced by the Royal Canadian Mint (presumably with great difficulty) in what seems to have been a high-profile game of “Can You Top This?”

In 2004, the Austrian Mint celebrated the 15^th anniversary of its Philharmonic gold bullion coin by producing 15 super-size examples of the coin, each containing 1,000 troy ounces (68.57 pounds) of pure gold and carrying a face value of 100,000 euros. This earned the giant Philharmonics a spot in Guinness World Records as the largest gold coins in the world.

 Canadian officials—green with envy and flush with gold—set about rewriting the record book by coming up with an even more mammoth Maple Leaf. The RCM made just five examples of the 2007 coin, one of which reportedly found its way to Queen Elizabeth.

Obviously, being one of only five pieces known doesn’t do nearly as much for the value of a 220.5-pound gold coin as it does for a 5-gram base-metal five-cent piece. Five, of course, is also the number of known examples of the 1913 Liberty Head nickel. One of those sold for $4.15 million in 2005—making it more valuable than the huge Maple Leaf, as well as much more portable.

With all these gold gargantuans floating around, who can blame the U.S. Mint for seeking its “pound of flash” by offering 5-ounce silver versions of the (dare I say those trademarked words) “America the Beautiful” quarters depicting national parks and historic sites. These, after all, are every bit as impractical as the Austrian and Canadian manhole covers. And having intrinsic worth of about $100 each, they seem even more foolish with their statement of value inscribed as QUARTER DOLLAR.

What’s more, the Mint’s “hockey puck” silver coins should give certification services a chance to stretch their new “Plus” grading to the limit. With all the king-size slabs that could be required, in fact, this might be the best time to get into plastics since Mister McGuire gave that advice to Benjamin Braddock in “The Graduate.”

If this keeps up, British coins won’t be the only ones whose value is measured in pounds. And everyone’s pay will be based on scale.

Then again, the whole idea may end up going over like a lead balloon.

We’ll just have to weight and see.

For years, I have been lamenting the dull, dreary–sometimes deplorable–coin designs emanating from the U.S. Mint. The result has been a huge collective yawn, followed by a murky stream of more insipid “artwork.”

Recently, however, my futile cry in the wilderness has been echoed by voices far more likely to get a respectful hearing from Mint officials: those of the federal Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee (CCAC), the two appointed panels that review–and render judgment on–new coin designs proposed by the Mint.

Members of both bodies were decidedly underwhelmed by the Mint’s design concepts for two commemorative coin programs coming up next year–one saluting the U.S. Army, the other the Medal of Honor. And they made no attempt to disguise their displeasure with this latest round of drab aesthetic also-rans.

After studying the designs, the Fine Arts Commission summed up its reaction in a letter to Mint Director Edmund C. Moy. It expressed “overall disappointment with the poor quality” of the work it was asked to approve.

“… The quality of designs remains embarrassingly low, both in the often amateurish character of the artwork and in the generally poor compositions,” the commission’s secretary, Tom Luebke, wrote in conveying the panel’s opinion.

 Luebke went on to say that in the commission’s view, a coin design should portray a subject as simply as possible, “rather than present a confusing collage of multiple elements.”

Gary Marks, chairman of the Citizens Committee, had a similar reaction after seeing the Army and Medal of Honor designs.

“The issue of coin design quality is a real one and it needs to be addressed,” Marks declared.

Like the Fine Arts panel, he criticized the clutter in many of the latest designs, as well as their lack of focus.

One, for instance, showed a scientist peering through a microscope while a UFO–or maybe a helicopter–hovered overhead. And why would there be a scientist on a U.S. Army coin? Your guess is as good as mine.

Another design had three distinct sections featuring, respectively, an Army surveyor, soldiers handling sandbags and a missile poised for launching.

“Those are just not designs that are appropriate for a coin, particularly a small coin that is little more than an inch in diameter,” Marks commented.

Instead of stark realism with confusing multiple images, he said, the Mint should return to the symbolism featured on the greatest U.S. coins of the past, such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ magnificent $20 gold piece.

“Saint-Gaudens,” he said, “gave us an allegorical symbol of Liberty pictured as very strong, walking toward us as if coming into the future with some powerful allegorical symbols in her hands.

“It was that symbolism that made the design great. What we often see now is the storyboard approach.”

Another CCAC member, Donald Scarinci, was even more outspoken, deploring the “banality” and “lack of artistry” in the 38 designs submitted by the Mint for the Army and Medal of Honor coins.

“There is no renaissance in coin design except in Director Moy’s statements,” said Scarinci, a lawyer who collects medallic art.

“Unless we and the Commission of Fine Arts stand up and say mediocrity is not acceptable, nothing is going to happen.”

After rubber-stamping most previous coin designs or recommending the least objectionable, sometimes amid muted grumbling, the CFA and CCAC both backed their criticism this time by refusing to endorse any of the designs suggested by the Mint for certain coins.

There will be three 2011-dated coins for the Army and two for the Medal of Honor. Each program will include a $5 gold piece and a silver dollar, and the Army set also will contain a clad half dollar. That comes to a total of 10 different sides–five obverses and five reverses.

The Fine Arts Commission declined to recommend any of the Mint’s proposals for three different sides of the coins, while the Citizens Committee withheld approval from one.

Sadly, both panels are only advisory bodies, so the Mint doesn’t need their approval. What’s more, it can ignore their recommendations–and frequently does. But at least their voices are heard, before joining mine in the wilderness.

 Perhaps someday our voices will reach the ears of someone who’s committed to a real coinage renaissance–one that turns up in Americans’ pockets and purses, not just in the Mint director’s speeches.

What we need is another Teddy Roosevelt.

Gold’s current cycle will take it well into the four-figure range, possibly even into five figures

by Maurice Rosen

Pro and COIN: How high the (Golden) Moon?

Gold will  hit $2,000 an ounce someday. For the good of the national economy, hopefully not on its current cycle

by Tom DeLorey

Diminishing Returns

A proliferation of circulating coins and collector exhaustion factor into the Mint’s lower seigniorage

by Dom Yanchunas

Chester Beach’s Time Capsule

Auction consignment preparations brought to light unexpected treasures from the medallic artist’s studio

by David T. Alexander

Coin Capsule: 2000

People viewed the year as the beginning of a whole new chapter in human history

by Ron Meyer

Book Notes

Everything from Insider’s and Hoards, to Patterns and Standards is reviewed this  month

by Mike Thorne

Collectors are spending their discretionary income more wisely, but they are still spending

by Dom Yanchunas

Reversing Direction for the Cent

The Lincoln cent’s new reverse is really a widely used symbol rom the past

by Tom DeLorey

The Money of British Monarchs: The Coinage of George V

An extensive range of issues makes this monarch’s coins highly collectible

by R.W. Julian

Coin Capsule: 1893

Americans sought to escape the Panic at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago

by Tom Toolen

Making Use of Manganese

The unstable metal has its place, but it has always caused problems when used in coinage

by David T. Alexander

Other Countries’ “State Quarters”

More and more commemoratives are being produced as one-time-only type coins for circulation

by Rita Laws, Ph.D.