THE LIBERTY SEATED CENT PATTERN

 

Pitter Patter About Patterns

Liberty Seated collectors tend to not discuss pattern coins, and it's understandable why. They are expensive, and no one is going to see cases full of pattern coins at a typical coin show. More typically you see a piece here and there in dealer offerings, perhaps a small group if a dealer specializes in patterns, but such dealers are few and far between. Even if pattern coins are generally available, no one is quite sure how to collect them. It's not like Whitman issues a coin folder with a list of the ones you are supposed to acquire.

Some years ago I came on the idea of collecting one each of every major design type within the Seated quarter pattern series. It's about seven or eight coins. Probably I was influenced by the old saying that every collection should contain at least one pattern coin. You can be sure that saying was made up by someone who had pattern pieces to sell. In any event, I bought the first coin from a self-proclaimed market maker in the series, a nice toner in PR66. I gave up on the series after a few failed attempts to acquire some of the tougher pieces, which exist in single-digit quantities. The PR66 got offered back to the dealer who sold it, and failed to attract even a lowball offer. So much for market maker status. I put the piece in a Heritage sale and took a $100 loss on it. In my view the $100 represented the cost to rent a rare coin for a few years.

Today I own only a single pattern piece, a Judd-158 1854 pattern cent that features the Liberty Seated design. The workmanship is crude and represents an intermediate step in the die production process. Reduced by a lathe from an 1854 dollar die, the die bears circular lathe marks that, in normal production, would be smoothed out. I enjoy the piece as a curiosity – who ever heard of a Liberty Seated cent? These dies were produced in order to test different alloys for coining, none of which were adopted, and the coiner was more interested in testing different compositions than in producing neatly finished dies.

For more information about the Liberty Seated Collectors Club, see:
http://www.lsccweb.org/

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