RWB

Comments about the coin are fine. But anything about selling it belongs on the Buy-Sell forum.

Best to merely ask-away and wait for members to request clarification. One irritation -- new collectors who assume they know about errors, doubled dies, and such things.

Why? It seems happy right where it is - and you lose $50.

"Icon" not an "avatar." An avatar is an active program element.

It "grades" C - for counterfeit/altered. It's worthless.

The dealers don't care about you or your hobby. They want your money and when that doesn't flow fast enough, they run away - regardless of what a table contract might say.

CaptHenway's comment is correct. However, it is unusual for a different pair of hubs to be used for proofs but not for circulation.

CAC puts green or gold ovals on coins they would like to buy. That's all the stickers mean. This is a great, very cheap way for them to cherry pick collections for the which they will resell at a substantial premium. It is a good play on collector grading ignorance and TPG inconsistency.

1. Sandblast was the standard name for sandblasting a coin or medal. It is specifically descriptive. "Matte" might convey surface appearance but "sandblast" includes more information. 2. Thanks to Breen "matte" was being tossed about as a surface description for several types of coins, leading to needless confusion. A rule of engineering is that the same term should not be applied to different classes of object. 3. "Sandblast" does not work well for the cents and nickels, because the coins were not directly treated - only the dies were treated. Hence the original descriptive term was re-applied to gold and certain silver proofs that were treated to a literal blast of fine sand at the mint. "Matte" works well as a descriptive of the surface effect when proof dies were sandblasted. Another detail to mention --- modern sandblasting of medals or coins will not reproduce the early 20th century appearance. Back then they used real silica (silicon oxide); now sandblasting is done with glass beads which are more uniform in size, and thus allows better control over the final effect. (For Saint-Gaudens sandblast proofs, use of different grit sizes and contaminated grit made each batch unique as well as each coin.)

If you had sent equal quantities of each "best" and "second best" to the two TPGs, you'd have useful information. As it is, there's no value. Much like tying to "disprove" a thin market by quoting a few price results - you have to examine a statistically valid sample. But, I understand your arguments.

1. Some of the 1965 SMS coin die preparation and production is in pubic US Mint literature. 2. Emery and rouge were still used in the 1930-40s. Cerium oxide was the post-WW-II standard largely because it was more consistent grit size. Diamond dust was too costly and harsh for coinage dies. Cerium remains in use for telescope optics.

The general description is correct, but diamond dust was never used -- cerium oxide was the polishing agent. All of this was before the use of friskets (masks) to isolate relief for frosting and possible re-frosting. We do not have really complete data on this little side-discussion of making modern proof coins.

The work would have been performed by the Medal Dept., who were the same ones who used a medal press to strike the coins. It is important to understand that there are several ordinary 1921 and 1922 low relief coins that were sandblasted outside of the mint in order to imitate a proof. To confuse things further, there seem to be several 1921 and 1922 HR coins that were both sandblasted and antiqued to more closely resemble medals. Some of these have appeared slabbed as proofs, but lack the necessary clarity of detail.

I have the same reaction when a restaurant tries to make customers use stupid QR codes, then want the diner to scroll through 20 pages of victuals. No menu. No customer.

Matte refers ONLY to early Lincoln cents and Buffalo nickels. The other two are correct. Referring to the 1921/1922 sandblast proof dollars as "matte" was a pile of horse droppings that someone (Breen ?) started just after WW-II. I blame Breen because he was prone to invent things when he didn't bother to do the research to learn the truth. From the first coin-use of sandblasting in 1908, the coins were always called "sandblast" or "sand blasted" which was also the Medal Dept.'s normal means of finishing most medals. (The work was done in the same department bu the same people.) About 20 years ago Dave Bowers and I began reverting to the original descriptive names for such pieces. "Matte" returned to "sandblast;" "Roman proof" returned to "satin." I was the one who did the research and discovered what was actually done. Kevin Flynn added more about sandblasting from a document he located. Since then, usage has slowly moved back to the original description approach for these and several other terms that have been misused for a long time. I also recommended reserving "matte" for the Lincoln and Buffalo proofs because that was a suitable descriptive term, and there could no longer be confusion about what "matte" meant. I have no clue about what the US Mint means with their surface descriptions. They refuse to fully explain and are not consistent -- hence I ignore them.

OK. Simple answer w/o footnotes. Dies received late April 16. First coins struck afternoon of April 17. Ten (approx) for distribution, then rest run a power until reverse die broke just short of 1,000 pieces. Only coins from this die pair, called VAM-60, were made the first day. No other coins share this reverse. The so-called "Specimen" is merely an early strike off a new die pair. It has not connection to the first coins struck at SF. There is no documentation about it being specially made, or any other unique circumstances. Therefore, it earns no special designation, and no special label. Further the word "Specimen" is undefined and has no meaning.

Word processors are all capable of producing indices on various levels -- something like a nested list. However, that means tagging every word that is to go into the index with its level. The WP files become larger, unwieldy and prone to crashing -- a lot. A simple searchable PDF file eliminates all the mess. Yes. That is the core problem. A printed index stays with the book, but every page is expensive in today's print market and every added page makes the book heavier. A digital index sold with/included is small, costs about $1 and is available to the book owner as needed -- but format changes can make even the best digital version obsolete within a year or two. A separate on-line index imposes maintenance and hosting expenses that cannot be recovered at the book sale. I'm trying to keep this simple, convenient, and inexpensive for buyers and myself.

Is it proportional in mass to Mercury?

Keep it in the original container. I presume other planetary ephemera are in the kitsch series.

No one can help without some good photos.

...but is the weight correct? The ad doesn't mention weight.

Yes, RG104 Entry 1 Box 002 Warrants 1792–1817 located at NARA Philadelphia.

Just for grins, here's a sample of what the original images looked like. Also, the photographer had the camera so far from the pages that they only filled about 1/4 of the frame -- thus wasting 3/4 of available resolution and producing fuzzy, grainy/pixely photos with poor resolution. The lighter vertical strip at center is white cloth binding tape -- about 235 on the 255 brightness scale.

Think of them as a long-term investment in personal enjoyment, history, finance and numismatics. If you'd spent the money on a snow blower, it'd be useless most of the time.

The US Mint was the authoritative place for assaying. Many people sent ore samples for assay. Most were just mica, pyrite, or plain old dirt. The original ink color was black. The sepia or reddish color in the photo is an artifact of very poor color photography. The original images were underexposed and made under low-wattage tungsten lights, but with the camera set on "daylight" color balance. This produced dark orange images. To correct the paper color to something closer to normal, I had to let the ink color slide to whatever part of the spectrum it happened to land in. It is possible to isolate the color range of the ink and shift that back to black, but the amount of work necessary is not worth the result. The amount of correct necessary for the above quality of appearance and readability is not trivial, so I have to decide if the content is worth the extra work. Much also depends on the condition of the original photo, but this is all we have for several decades.