Steve D'Ippolito

Just saw my very first US Virgin Islands quarter.

Well, when it rains, it pours. Got a less than G-4 Buffalo Nickel. No date, supposedly it needs a date to be G-4. Well this makes a wheatie with a somewhat unusual date, a 1944 quarter, and a buffalo nickel all within the last year, when most years I don't get squat.

Is it still being produced?

On the other side of the coin, I've run into Canadians who don't know about their 50 cent piece.

Got a Chickasaw quarter... that's only the second or third national forests and seashores quarter I've gotten in change.

This period is sandwiched in the ranges of my collection. Russian Imperial and US takes us from 1700 to present; my ancients end in the 7th century (and no AD date in any case). I have some wire money from about this time, but no dates on it either. (And if they were, they'd be both a different numbering and date system! Cyrillic dates and in Byzantine "Year of the World" dates.)

Or the shipping to and from PCGS or NGC. I've seen NGC slabs a foot across around multi pound sliver NCLTs, So I'd consider an NGC slabbed yapstone far more likely.

I believe you are referring to the island of Yap, which is in the Caroline Islands, Micronesia (not Indonesia). I don't have any but I know some people who do. I don't think anyone has gotten one slabbed yet.

Full steps are just tricky. So many Jeffersons not only don't have full steps, they don't have ANY steps... just a solid bar under the pillars.

Oh, and by the way... that 1996 proof set? He did NOT break it open. He was able to apply suction to one end of it and get the H2S gas to go through the seams in the packaging. The packaging is not air tight and should not be relied on to prevent toning.

I believe it was called "Coin Chemistry" by Weimar W. White. But if focuses almost entirely on silver, and paging through it I see nothing whatsoever about the cupronickel alloy we are discussing--other than a report on deliberately exposing coins in a 1996 proof set to hydrogen sulfide (they toned heavily in only an hour). An index would make this certain, but there isn't one.

Clever they way they did the swimming bear. I tend to agree with neweden on NCLTs. Every once in a while I see one I happen to like and I'll buy it because I find the theme interesting, but I won't systematically collect them.

It most likely isn't, according to the dealer who sold it to me, who ought to know. But I can certainly understand why you'd ask. (Is this the coin you asked about via Omnicoin a couple of days ago? The e-mail Omnicoin sent me with your comment doesn't indicate what coin the comment is about, which suggests a possible improvement to Omnicoin.) Here's the description from the auction catalog: So I call it a "maybe but probably not." And certainly "superb orginal" got my attention, and my money. This brings up the point that restrikes from fully original dies are going to be the trickiest novodels to discover, because they could be made in the same manner as the originals. You might even have to analyze the metal in the coin to figure it out; if it's too pure it's probably done later with better refining technology. (Hmmm, might be worth it in this case; x ray fluorescence is getting cheaper and cheaper.) (In fact this is probably a valid way to find the rumored later restrikes of the imperial platinum coins, though I should think the visual appearance of the platinum would be a strong clue too.)

Especially if you can get the field to look black in the photograph. Very appropriate, actually, on the reverse.

Not too implausible now that you mention it. It would be an interesting question to ask a real expert. Which I surely ain't.

Now you have two of the three Indian Head types--you've got a cupronickel 1862 and a bronze 1903. I suspect finding an 1859 with the older wreath will be a bit of a challenge. (And most IHC collectors bring in the Flying Eagle cent as well, just because its 1857-58 run was so short it's sort of a prelude. (Yes, I know there was an 1856 Flying Eagle pattern as well.) ) Meanwhile you are starting to see some filling in of your date runs for current types. It's interesting to read the perspective of someone outside of the US working on a collection of coins that I deal with every day. (I remember seeing a perfectly ordinary nickel in the "junk foreign" bucket of a coin dealer set up at some sort of weekend market in Maastricht a couple of days after I got to Europe as a tourist (1991), and having to give that one a fraction of a second of thought--no, it wasn't a mistake and it didn't belong in the cash register. If I hadn't deliberately left my US change at home I could probably have made a small business deal with the proprietor, perhaps gotten an entire guilder for a dollar's worth of change. On second thought, bad idea.) You are probably wishing you could just spend a lot of time over here plucking all those missing dates from circulation. Even without doing determined mass searches of rolls you still see clad coins from the 60s from time to time, older Lincoln Memorial cents, and even--much more infrequently--older nickels from the 1950s and before (it has been a while since I got one, come to think of it), wheat reverse cents (once or twice a year), and the like. OK, I should quit twisting the knife, trying to get you envious. (Of course those older coins won't be in the best of condition!)

I love it when outright fakers call their product "novodels," presumably thinking they are being honest about what they are selling. Or that they hope you will think so. Either way they are probably hoping to use the word to weasel out of a charge of fraud. When you manufacture a coin that isn't what it purports to be (i.e., an actual proof, pattern or business strike coin of that denomination, made in [see footnote] that year), it's a fake. Unless you happen to be the mint, in which case it's a novodel. Claiming a fake is a novodel just gives you a fake novodel as opposed to a real novodel. Being a product of the mint, a real novodel is something collectible, but I nevertheless wasn't interested; I wanted "real" coins, business strikes (that excluded proofs and patterns too, to the relief of my wallet). I think over the years I purchased two by mistake. One of them was not attributed right at the auction (which I should have spotted but didn't--it was pretty obvious), so I got my money back; the other I decided I would flip (I paid a lot less than novodel price for it), forgot about it, then it ended up in the sale of my collection--labeled as such.

I think I've seen a grand total of maybe three National Forest quarters, personally, and there's no major vending machine industry to recirculate quarters here. (I'll bet you see a lot of beat up and tired specimens, Art.) I got a slightly larger number of DC & Territories quarters. This got my attention to the point where I actually bought 10 unc mint sets back in 2009, figuring they might actually go _up_ in value a few years down the road as the quarters' scarcity began to tell in the market. Didn't do that for 2010 or 2011, but it probably would have been a better idea those years than in 2009. What we might be seeing is the system still working through the absolute glut of quarters produced in the early years of the state quarters program. People were keeping them for a while, but now, perhaps, they've decided they aren't worth more than face and they are going out into circulation again. That reduces demand for new quarters.

True, there is a copper layer well under the cupronickel face... but I can't see why that should matter; it's well away from the surface of the coin. Of course one always does learn new things (or one is dead). On second thought: One possibility, that would apply in very closed (or even airtight) environments is that the copper band visible around the edge (which tones up to a dirty look that is ugly in circulation) could be soaking up whatever air contaminants or even oxygen, that cause toning, thereby preventing them from affecting the cupronickel. On a nickel, of course, the contaminants and oxygen have no choice but to react to the cupronickel, which they will eventually do. I suppose I could dig up my late 60s-early 70s mint and proof sets and compare the nickel to the dime and quarter. That will control for age.

The Jefferson nickel is made out of the same stuff as the outer layers of the clad coinage--25 percent nickel, 75 percent copper. Hardly "unlike any other." So from the standpoint of the surface appearance, it shouldn't be any different, at least not due to the fabric. However, they can be up to 26 years older. And maybe the field is more or less concave than on the quarter or dime; that could make a difference.

Couldn't agree more!

Sometimes for very small/thin coins, the white part of the older NGC holder really overhangs the coin quite a bit, making photography a bit of a challenge. And of course their new holder that lets you see most of the edge covers parts of the rim! Apparently if you send a coin to NGC today it will get into one of these holders. The PCGS plastic shown in the previous post at least is translucent enough that it won't be distracting in a photograph. For whatever reason I have always found the PCGS holders more attractive, but obviously Art's mileage differs.

Sounds like the tech has finally caught up with what I wanted to do years ago. Many years ago, I bought one of the old tablet PCs--and it's a real tablet, not one of those laptops that had a swivel display--by today's standards the size of a battleship, with the idea of being able to set it down flat at the case I was sitting in front of at a show, without it covering a huge area. I wanted a large screen but not a full blown laptop. I made up a webpage (stored locally on the machine), bonestock HTML, that had most of my Russian Imperial coins as pictures. (And that, in-and-of itself, is another story!) Recent purchases I could carry with me for direct comparison, they didn't bulk all that much. Alas the battery was flaky and the display was never bright enough; the tech wasn't quite ready for several hours of wandering a bourse floor where power drops accessible to the public are sparse. I bought the keyboard accessory and it still serves me as my traveling laptop, but it is by no means truly suitable for the task I intended it for. Of course, I ended up selling the collection anyway. For what I collect now, a printed checklist more than suffices.

I know in the US as a young collector in the 70s and 80s it seemed like just about any small Soviet change I ever encountered was dated 1961. And apparently there was a 100:1 revaluation of the ruble that year.

I do like the way they brought out the detail in Monticello on the new reverse. It stands out even to a casual glance. The new portrait I am basically neutral on--I could go either way--but at least it isn't ugly like some of the presidential dollar portraits. I was half expecting that they'd re-do Lincoln in the same style in 2010, and Washington as well at the conclusion of the state quarters, but they clearly didn't in the case of the cent, and I doubt there will ever be a regular-issue quarter ever again--the special interests have latched onto it and under _current_ law these national forest and seashore quarters could run through 2030 (ye gods). By which time they may well have inflated away to zero face value.