New Quarters in the Saturday Evening Post
Dennis: I imagine most of our readers—being history buffs but also hip to pop culture—know the Saturday Evening Post is still around. Some might even be members of the Saturday Evening Post Society, the nonprofit that’s published the magazine since 1982. Those of us in the know saw that coin collecting got a shout-out in the venerable publication’s January/February 2025 issue. That put our hobby in front of hundreds of thousands of readers.
The Saturday Evening Post has been around in various forms and formats since the early 1820s. By the 1850s it had 90,000 subscribers. As the turn of the century approached it was still issued weekly, and was admired as the oldest newspaper in the country, but its style by then was old-fashioned—all typography, no illustrations, and almost no advertising. By the 1890s its circulation had dropped to 2,000 stalwarts.
A new publisher, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, bought the failing Post in 1897 and breathed fresh life into it. He redesigned the format, introduced new content, and debuted full-page cover illustrations. By 1900 its circulation skyrocketed to 250,000. In 1902 it was more than 500,000, and in 1908 the Post became the first American magazine to reach a circulation of one million. Its popularity continued to grow. Two million by 1913. Three million in the 1930s.
Many famous writers wrote for the Post, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rudyard Kipling, and Gertrude Stein. It attracted talented artists, the likes of Andrew Wyeth, J.C. Leyendecker, George Hughes, and Norman Rockwell, who started creating covers in 1916. The magazine reached its peak circulation—nearing seven million—in 1960.
[Image: A Saturday Evening Post cover from 1927. Courtesy of the Saturday Evening Post Society.]
Circulation today is a far cry from the millions of a century ago. But if a subject can get into the Saturday Evening Post, it’ll be read by some 150,000 subscribers (and maybe double that in pass-along readers). Given that large audience, I was pleased to see a numismatic poll in the January/February 2025 issue.
“What Do You Think?” the poll asked. “The U.S. Mint’s American Women Quarters program will end in 2025. Which Americans should appear on the next quarters?”
This is a question for the general non-numismatic public, because hardcore collectors know that Semiquincentennial quarter dollars (celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary of independence) will be available in 2026. And after that we’ll have a four-year program of American Youth Sports (2027–2030). So the quarter dollar is already mapped out until 2031.
At any rate, Saturday Evening Post readers weighed in, and these were the results:
Artists 10%
Athletes 13%
Authors 30%
Latino Americans 5%
Musicians 25%
Steve, where do you see the quarter dollar going in the 2030s and beyond?
Steve: Ah…the Semiquincentennial certainly has a cumbersome name to contend with. Part of the celebrations are set to include a National Garden of American Heroes including 250 life-sized statues of figures including Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, and Whitney Houston with an overall goal of adhering to an effort to portray American history and culture in a positive light.
The National Garden of American Heroes is scheduled to open July 2026 and will honor historical figures from America’s past who have contributed to the nation’s cultural, scientific, economic and political heritage. President Trump’s Executive Order 13978 of January 18, 2021, stated: “The National Garden will feature a roll call of heroes who deserve honor, recognition, and lasting tribute because of the battles they won, the ideas they championed, the diseases they cured, the lives they saved, the heights they achieved, and the hope they passed down to all of us—that united as one American people trusting in God, there is no challenge that cannot be overcome and no dream that is beyond our reach.”
A core part of this program is the creation of life-sized marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass sculptures and the concept of having quarter dollar designs based on these sculptures seems plausible. The list of people that are proposed to be honored is wide-ranging with many household names that have never been on a coin before. Even better: the demographics in the Saturday Evening Post poll are widely included in the list of 250 figures.
Yet, there are doubts as to the feasibility of this project since sculptors interviewed for a May 31, 2025, article by Michael Schaffer for Politico suggested that America lacks enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen with the compressed timeframe. The Executive Order said that the sculptures will, “reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism,” and by extending them to circulating quarter dollars, the reach will be even more expansive.
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Hello! And welcome to the ANA’s blog series, “Collecting Friends.”
We decided to approach this much like a conversation between friends. One of us starts with a topic, then the other responds. Simple as that. Along those lines, we’ll keep the tone conversational as much as possible.
We both write about coins professionally, and will keep our relative style guides in our writing. For Dennis, former Publisher at Whitman Publishing, that means capitalizing “Proof” and italicizing Red Book and never saying anything bad about Ken Bressett, who’s awesome anyway.
For Steve, who’s written with Coin World for 15 years, it means Winged Liberty Head dime instead of “Mercury” dime, and similar nuances and oddities. And, it means writing A Guide Book of United States Coins (better known as the “Red Book”).
Both of us started collecting when we were little, introduced to coins by a chance encounter with an old coin that sparked our curiosity. One of Steve’s interests is coin valuation, and he gravitates towards the intersection of art and coins. Dennis enjoys medals and world coins, and studying modern U.S. coins in the context of older series, what came before.
We met in 2012 at the American Numismatic Association World’s Fair of Money in Philadelphia at an event hosted by the Austrian Mint where there was both a Ben Franklin and a Betsy Ross impersonator. We’ve become great friends in the past decade. We even were appointed together to sit on the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee starting in 2016, but Steve resigned soon after he was appointed to accept a full-time job at the Treasury Department while Dennis was re-appointed in 2020.
We taught a course together on numismatic publishing and writing a few years ago at the Summer Seminar, and while life has gotten in the way of us teaching another class, we jumped at our friend Caleb’s suggestion that we write a column. We hope you enjoy it!
The American Numismatic Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating and encouraging people to study and collect coins and related items. The Association serves collectors, the general public, and academic communities with an interest in numismatics.
The ANA helps all people discover and explore the world of money through its vast array of educational programs including its museum, library, publications, conventions and numismatic seminars.