Collecting Friends: When Is Too Much Missing?

When Is Too Much Missing?

Steve: In November 2022, international auction house Christie’s withdrew a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named Shen in Hong Kong, citing a need for further study after some claimed that it was largely a replica of Shen that sold two years prior for a massive $31.8 million. The consignor decided to loan Shen to a museum for public display instead. 

Christie’s said that Shen was “54 percent represented by bone density” with 79 original bones from an unknown original total bone count. Virtually all large dinosaur skeletons are incomplete, meaning that most of the creatures we see in museums utilize casts of other bones and reconstructed additions. By comparison, Shen had 190 original bones. 

This story made me think about the idea of completion for coins and how some coins can be identified without a date, like a 1796 Draped Bust, Small Eagle quarter that is a one-year type, or even a 1916 Standing Liberty quarter dollar that has some minor design differences from the 1917-dated issues. 

[Can you spot the differences in the Standing Liberty quarter designs above?]

It also recalled a favorite coin that I’ve written about a few times: a 1792 Silver Center cent pattern where the silver center plug is not silver, but iron, and apparently not original. The Silver Center patterns were a way to get a cent’s worth of metal in a smaller format than a pure copper large cent. The plug would have been inserted into a center hole in the copper planchet and upon striking the silver plug would flatten and spread out on both sides. It’s considered the nation’s first bimetallic coin and a precursor to the small cent, but it was tough to produce and the idea was abandoned at the pattern stage. 

Pete Smith, a co-author of the book 1792: Birth of a Nation’s Coinage shared, “I have been amused with auction lot descriptions that referred to the small copper cents as silver center cent without silver center. Perhaps this coin should be described as silver center cent without metallic silver center but with silver colored center.” It sold for $78,000 in 2017 and more recently brought $52,800 in 2020, now housed in a holder with the grade Very Good Details, Plug Replaced, Repaired, Scratched, by Numismatic Guaranty Corp. It’s a remarkably affordable price for a “Silver Center Cent” but also a big price for a coin that is only partially genuine.

Given that a problem-free example is at least a quarter-million dollar coin, Dennis, what do you make of this?

Dennis: This reminds me of the most valuable piece of gold in American numismatics: the mintmark on a 1927-D Saint-Gaudens double eagle! That tiny curlicue of metal adds a million dollars to the coin’s price tag.

I’m being facetious, of course; the “D” is the mark of a coin produced at Denver, which only minted 180,000 double eagles in 1927. Most of those sat in Treasury vaults and were later melted after gold coins were recalled in 1933. Dave Bowers estimates that only a dozen still exist, or maybe a few more, making the 1927-D the rarest twentieth-century gold coin of any denomination, after the 1933 double eagle.

A double eagle of 1927 with no mintmark was made in Philadelphia in much larger quantities (almost three million coins) and they’re still common a hundred years later. Bowers estimates that 650,000 or more are available for collectors.

So that tiny sliver of D-shaped gold is the difference between a common $2,500 coin and a $1,500,000 treasure.

[1927 Double Eagle Image Courtesy PCGS]

If somebody artfully soldered a gold “D” onto a 1927 Philadelphia double eagle, would a wealthy and passionate collector pay $1,000,000—or even a deep-discounted $250,000—for it? Probably not.

But what if the person who added the mintmark was Mint Director Robert J. Grant? Or President Franklin Roosevelt himself? What if it were done as part of a mint-technology experiment, and only three were made? What if a single coin was created as a unique diplomatic gift and presented to King George V of Great Britain? Would two specialists with deep pockets and a competitive streak battle at auction and bid it up to, say, $100,000? Would another 125 years of history add to its lore—and to its value?

This is just a mental exercise, and it’s not a perfect analogy to the 1792 Silver Center cents. But it’s interesting to ponder how numismatic mysteries, and the passage of time, and intriguing stories, and the perception of rarity, all add to the value of certain coins, whether they’re pristine or flawed, original or refurbished. A coin is worth whatever the buyer and seller agree on. I’m sure the collector who owns the iron-plugged cent loves it much more than he would twenty-five common 1927 double eagles that cost him the same amount of money. Will he see a profit when it’s time to sell? That’s for the next buyer to decide.

Be on the lookout for another installment of Collecting Friends next month or subscribe here and never miss a post! In the meantime, explore beautiful coins from the ANA's Edward C. Rochette Money Museum Virtual Exhibits.

About the Collecting Friends Blog

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, 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! 

About the American Numismatic Association

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.