Barberian

I was sitting in my busted office chair, occasionally expelling gas, while staring at late Philly SLH mintages in the Redbook. They're an interesting group of coins that I refer to as "the Maginot Line" of the series for their formidably low mintages, yet they're relatively easy to "get around" or acquire. They just happen to occur at the end of the sequence rather than at the beginning like their namesake of WWII. I've been working on them, recently acquiring an 1882 and 1888 while searching for a circulated 1879 that I like. The pattern was apparent to me after looking at their mintages repeatedly through the years. Just like 2000-coin batches appear to be the pattern in many years for SLHs. There are other years where the batch size appears to be, for example, 300 halves ('66, '68-'71), but these mintages could also be arrived at with a number of batch sizes or combinations of batch sizes. Perhaps different mints show different patterns, I don't know. Something to look into.

Pardon the third person reply. This is a copy and paste with some editing of my response ATS. Perhaps I should post over here more often. "RWB offers a succinct explanation that I can apply to figure out the rest. He states it makes shipping and accounting easier rather than the result of the planchet manufacturing and coining process. This still leaves some questions as to why mintages of halves are divisible by 200 (1886 & 1887) and 400 ('79-'85, '88-'90), and quarters by 400 in those years. In many other years, the halves appear to be minted in $1000 batches (final mintage for halves usually in even thousands) rather than reaching a final round number for the year. They seemed to do these fixed-size batches throughout the mintage process, with batch size depending upon bullion availability and the magnitude of mintage. At least that's what I conclude drawing from RWB's comments." Does that seem reasonable, RWB?

And I have a 66-S w/motto seated half slathered in brown PVC that's holdered in a top TPG competitor's holder. Another with a bright emerald "crystal" on the reverse shield as if it were jewelry. Sometimes these issues aren't spotted in grading. Talk to NGC and have them evaluate the problem.