Walter Breen
Dime. [710] B-1. Normal skirt, the contours of drapery complete. There may be minute positional varieties of date. LM 4/66:217.
- *B-2. Incomplete drapery, a blank area above shield. (The die was too vigorously lapped.) One wonders if the collectors of the day did not raise a few eyebrows at the nakedness here implied. Not rare. Cf. LM 11/65:274, etc.
Mintage: 420, 120 and 170 in first, second and fourth quarters, total 710, all of which went into the proof sets.
Quarter. [710] Left base of 1 just r. of left edge. Rev. Left red stripes thin. Here as in former years many of the limited number of survivors of the 10,000 business strikes are still trying to join the chorus line of proofs (and vice versa), and some have just about made it, being all but indistinguishable (once scrubbed) from the less carefully made proofs accorded the same treatment. The rare business strikes have date slanting minutely down, left base of lover space, normal rev. stripes, no polish in those at r. Speculator activity has driven up prices on this date though not to the extent of 1884 or 1886 -though there are actually more of those dates around, affording the speculators more opportunity for the Big Lie technique of shouting "Very Rare!" hundreds of times a year.
Mintage: First, second and fourth quarters, 400 145 and 165, total 710, all of them going into the proof sets.
Half Dollar. [710] Date below center of exergual space; no doubling on stars. Beistle I-A; WGC: 353. I do not know if this is actually a proof-only variety. I have seen some pieces from this die which are virtually impossible to diagnose, so carelessly have they been made - rounded rims and edges, flat stars, sometimes flat heads, no real improvement over the partly frosty business strikes. And even the better struck ones, once drastically cleaned (usually once is not enough for the owners of these), can no longer be told for certain.
- Second die: Date minutely above center of 1 microscopically recut, left base of 1 above r. edge. Rev. Die file mark above space between ER, no polish in stripes. 1974 GENA: 1636.
The business strikes (5000) seem to be largely from another die, date still higher, left base of 1 left of center, doubled stars, rev. faint die file marks in AT, TES, ER. (Beistle I-A, but should have been called 2-A.) Compare WGC: 354. It is possible that proofs may also exist from this obverse die; cf. LM 9/67:265, LM 3/68:676. In the period 1884.1888 in many different denominations -nickel 3¢, 5¢, quarters, halves, silver dollars, gold dollars, quarter eagles, three dollar gold pieces -the mint was so careless about distinguishing proofs from business strikes, not by the Canadian technique of improving the latter, but by the counterfeiter's technique of sloppiness on the former, that sometimes accurate diagnosis stops even being a nightmare and becomes an impossibility. And it remains so even on the coins which have not had their proof surfaces and their highest relief details scrubbed away. 0 tempera, 0 mores. Auction records for coins labeled proofs – I cannot guarantee that they actually were ever part of the proof sets -in the neighborhood of $325; and $350-400 up for business strikes, which are possibly four to six times as rare. The date is actually a little rarer than 1886 in proof, but try and get any speculator to believe it. What was that Latin phrase again?
Mintage: First, second and fourth quarters, 440, 75 and 195, total 710, all going into the proof sets.
Silver Dollar. [710] VAM -: top of 7 slightly doubled. Same comments as to 1885, word for word. Mintage, quoted, 450, 105, 0, and 155, total 710.
Silver proof sets. [710] In the four quarters there were delivered 380, 90, 40 and 200, total 710. I have seen one set in the original mint wrappers, cent to silver dollar, 1952 ANA:4446, to Ralph J. Lathrop. Its 3¢ is the overdate. Unfortunately there was no dated invoice. Some other sets survived intact, e.g. Garrett's, from the Mint 1/25/1887, at $2,900; its 3¢ is the rarer perfect date, suggesting that the overdate came later in the year.
This is also the year in which the then Mint Director, the notorious, sanctimonious, and numismatically malodorous Dr. James Putnam Kimball, defined proofs in his Annual Report as "A coin specially struck by hand-press instead of by steam-press from a polished planchet." (Quoted in NSM 8/65, p. 2177 footnote.) To which all I can say is that some of the mint employees using the hand-press must have had hangovers; and that Kimball - over 100 miles from the scene -either did not know or chose to ignore the use of polished dies and multiple impressions for making proofs. He is better known - or rather, worse - for having had the Humpty Dumpty chutzpah to redefine "pattern" to mean only the first proofs of a newly accepted design - e.g. 8-feather Morgan dollars, 1866 coins with motto, 1877 new type twenties. He had no precedent and no follower outside the Treasury in this particular misguided excursion into lexicography; yet the Treasury adhered to his dictum for decades. His purpose, of course, was to define all other irregular mint products as illegal and subject to seizure - even those which had been publicly sold by the mint before his own day!