1818/5 25C MS(PCGS#5323)
1818/5 25C MS (PCGS#5323)
Summer 2025 Global Showcase Auction U.S. Coins
- 拍卖行
- Stack's Bowers
- 批号
- 4239
- 等级
- VF35
- 价格
- 12,425
- 详细说明
- Tompkins Die Stage 3/6, Rea et al. Die State e. A lovely mid-grade offering for the earliest overdate variety in the Capped Bust quarter series. Handsomely toned surfaces exhibit warm golden-gray patina with glints of steel-olive here and there around the peripheries. Well executed in strike, uniformly bold Choice VF detail remains in the presence of moderate, even wear. This is a first rate coin for the assigned grade, originally preserved and impressively smooth in hand.<p>Quarter dollar coinage at the request of bullion depositors recommenced in 1818, after no examples were produced in 1816 or 1817. With 361,174 pieces delivered, calendar year 1818 saw the highest mintage for this denomination from its inception in 1796 until the introduction of the Reduced Diameter coinage in 1831. As the Spanish American wars of independence approached their conclusion, the availability of Spanish colonial 2 reales for domestic circulation in the United States began to fall off markedly, thereby explaining the greater need for the United States Mint's alternative.<p>The 1818/5 Browning-1 represents the first of two uses for this obverse die, the other the 1818 B-3, but with the overdate feature no longer readily evident in that later pairing. The reverse die of the 1818/5 B-1 is unknown in any other marriage. While examples of this overdate are plentiful in an absolute sense, our consignor describes the terminal die state offered here as "very scarce" in his 2008 reference on early U.S. Mint quarters. The most significant of several prominent reverse cracks that define this die state is a bisecting one from the upper border outside the second letter T in STATES to the lower border at the digit 5 in the denomination. These cracks obviously felled the die and resulted in its withdrawal from production.<p><strong>Steve M. Tompkins Commentary:</strong> The very rare LDS that has the bisecting die crack that progressed vertically through the eagle to the border below the denomination. When Mark Entman showed this coin to me at the PNNA I of course had to have it. Its purchase led to me amending the die stages listed in my book - right before I sent it off to the printer.