DAVID LANGE'S LINCOLN CENT TOKENS

The illustrations of Ken Potter's GOOD FOR tokens reminded me of my own experience in commissioning tokens from the Gallery Mint to commemorate publication of my book The Complete Guide to Lincoln Cents in 1996. I may have submitted something about this to The E-Sylum previously, but I took out these tokens to study recently, and I can provide a little more information than before.

For my first two books in the Complete Guide series I had ordered wooden nickels to give out to anyone I encountered in the hobby, but the cent book was a much grander project, and I wanted to provide a little more substantial souvenir. I had gotten to know engraver Ron Landis from our times together at the ANA Summer Seminars, so I asked him to prepare token dies based on the sketch I supplied him. I used the grading illustration from an early edition of the ANA's grading guide and simply modified it as needed.

Ron worked fairly quickly and sent me three tokens as samples of his dies. These were struck over a circulated Memorial Cent of unreadable date (#1), an uncirculated 1980 Memorial Cent (#2) and a brass planchet of his own making (#3). The work was very crude, just like my sketch, and I've always wondered whether he did this intentionally as a literal interpretation of my scribbles.

I expressed to him my disappointment that the samples looked nothing like real cents, and I sent him a genuine coin from which to make transfer dies as a model for his revised token dies. The result was a fairly convincing imitation of a 1909-S V.D.B. cent into which he punched the word COPY on both sides. Ron coined this one in medal rotation to further distinguish it from an actual coin. I immediately said that he was on the right track, and I gave him the thumbs up to proceed with the modified reverse die having my inscriptions.

This last step was never performed. Ron and I had shared the four sample pieces with fellow instructors and others at the 1996 ANA Summer Seminar. A few days later I learned from Ron that some busybody within the ANA informed him that he was counterfeiting and that the ANA would not allow that. It didn't make any difference that the tokens as actually struck would have customized reverse legends that couldn't possibly lead to their being sold as genuine coins. Ron got spooked and backed away from the whole project, letting me keep the samples without charge as a consolation. I gave up on commemorating my book in any way, so there were no wooden nickels this time!

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
KEN POTTER'S MICHIGAN GOOD FOR TOKENS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v18n17a38.html)

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