![]() Set Aside or Later Inventories Because the engraving of new dates in master dies was done by hand, the new cent master die ended up with a larger date. The 1916 Standing Liberty quarters were not saved in BU rolls because they were struck in very small quantities very late in the year, and ended up getting dumped into the 1917 production and being distributed in mixed-date rolls. New issues such as the 1909 Lincoln cents, the 1913 Buffalo nickels and the 1916 “Mercury” dimes and Walking Liberty halves would have been saved in larger quantities because of the expected demand for the new designs. (I have always assumed that certain collectible varieties that involve badly degraded dies such as the 1922 “No-D” cents and the 1937-D “3-Legged” nickels are rare in true Uncirculated condition because the dealers putting away the rolls would have looked at a roll containing such “defective” coins and dumped them back into circulation, finding another roll of well-struck coins for inventory to keep their customers happy.) ![]() Thanks to this practice, the hobby today has many surviving examples of most modern-date coins in Choice BU condition-though, of course, the rolls did not survive as rolls since they were broken up for the single coin sales. Examining Small Date Cent Mintageįor many decades before 1960, it was traditional for established coin dealers to put away a roll or two of each new issue for inventory purposes to meet the demand for future single coin sales. Even today, most collectors have no idea why it had an (unofficial) mintage of only 2,075,000 pieces, a mere pittance that the current Philadelphia Mint can turn out in less than an hour. ![]() I was too young to appreciate the peculiar chain of events that led to the striking of the epicenter of this madness: the 1960-P Small Date cent, which is apparently the lowest-mintage regular-issue U.S. Being a child of limited means, content with filling Whitman folders, I was not affected personally at the time, but it affected the coin collecting universe greatly, and eventually my life. coin market was mesmerized by the concept of collecting and/or hoarding original BU rolls of coins. Editor's Note: This article was awarded the honor of Best Article during the 2017 Numismatic Literary Guild Writers' Competition.Ībout the time that I started collecting coins, around 1960, the U.S.
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