Walter Breen
Author's Forward
As long ago as 1947, when I was a teenager first interested in coins, I was especially curious about large cents. What were all the different kinds? Who designed them? Why were the designs changed? How were they made? Who made them? Why did we have such bulky coins then, instead of the lighter (and more easily lost) Indian and Lincoln cents? Were there any fakes? How could one identify genuine coins? This was the second year of Richard S. Yeoman's Guide Book; and rereading my copy left me frustrated, as it raised more questions than it answered. The way the book read, Mr. Yeoman seemed to be summarizing and selecting from a much larger body of knowledge, but he gave no clue as to where one could find the unabridged version.
Libraries, including the American Numismatic Association library, then run by Ted Hammer, yielded only a few clues. Andrews' pamphlet on the 1816-1857 cents was as dull reading as a phone book. Doughty's book was not much more informative, besides requiring both a protractor and a ruler; and when I knew, or thought I knew, the Doughty number of a variety, I still knew nothing more about the coin, not even if it was rare or common. Edouard Frossard's Monograph of United States Cents and Half Cents, Issued Between the Years 1793 and 1857 was at least a little more descriptive and had passable photographic illustrations. Frossard-Hays on 1794 cents illustrated their numbers-so that I could confidently recognize what I had, if I could ever afford a 1794 cent sharp enough to attribute! S. Hudson Chapman, in his 1926 work The United States Cents of the Year 1794, attempted to reconstruct, from style and technical arguments, the order in which the coins were made: a distinct improvement. Howard R. Newcomb and George H. Clapp covered the other dates from 1795-1814 the same way, only better. Sylvester S. Crosby on 1793 cents went further still by fitting the designs into their historical context, but why was there no single book covering the whole cent series the way Crosby had covered 1793?
The 1947 ANA Convention catalogue offered the "Sheraton" collection of early large cents, formed by Robert Henderson of Sheraton Hotel fame, with the innovation that the varieties of all dates were attributed to "Sheldon numbers" and were given "basal values" and "numerical grades" for estimates of value. Its cataloguer, Abe Kosoff, mentioned that these were from Dr. Sheldon's new book, which the Numismatic Gallery expected to publish shortly. This sounded like the answer to my prayers.
Sheldon's Early American Cents finally appeared in 1949, with the imprint not of any coin firm, but of Harper & Bros. On its dust jacket were brief blurbs for his three earlier books (The Varieties of Human Physique, Harper & Brothers, 1940; The Varieties of Temperament, Harper & Brothers, 1949; Varieties of Delinquent Youth, Harper & Brothers, 1949. Atlas of Men, Harper & Brothers, followed a few years later, in 1952.) on constitutional psychology, classifying and correlating human physiques and temperaments: books that for a while had made endomorph, mesomorph and ectomorph into household words; books that I felt had alreadyenabled me to understand myself better. I was astonished to learn that the Sheldon who wrote on cents was also the internationally recognized psychologist: so much for "shoemaker, stick to your last." Here was a bonafide expert in several fields, someone I could admire more than any narrow specialist. A pupil of Freud, Adler, and Jung, Dr. Sheldon had abandoned both depth psychology's vague hypothetical abstractions and behaviorism's mechanistic oversimplifications, in favor of a bodily measurement system that easily explained differences in behavioral styles, differences for which no previous theories even attempted to account. His scientific credentials imparted extra credibility to his coin work. Still more remarkably, he wrote even the most technical material in a terse and dryly witty style, a delight to read just as literature; whereas other scientists seemed to be trying to keep their writings as forbiddingly difficult as possible, deliberately to exclude outsiders who didn't know the jargon. I felt I could trust anything he wrote. Early American Cents not only changed numismatic history, but created it-put between a single pair of covers was just about everything I wanted to know about that series. I quickly learned it nearly by heart: well enough to recognize varieties by mentally matching themwith the plates; like recognizing friends' faces, except that the coins' names were numbers. As Sheldon's book kept reminding us, all the varieties had their own unique personalities, as :individualized as humans, and in some ways equally mysterious. I did not then even imagine that my studying cents would entangle my career with Sheldon's.
In one of those odd events that stretch the term "coincidence" beyond all reasonable limits, John J. Ford, Jr. invited me to come to New York City on December 2, 1950, to meet Charles M. Wormser and Wayte Raymond. A few hours later, I also met Dr. William H. Sheldon, Dorothy 1. Paschal, Homer K. Downing, and C. Douglas Smith. That day was one of the turning points of my life. It immediately led to Wayte Raymond's hiring me to work at the National Archives, beginning my career. That month, my first letter to The Numismatist was published. It directly led to Sheldon's becoming my mentor, though he never understood me. It indirectly led to my working for New Netherlands Coin Co. (Wormser and Ford), and learning to write auction catalogues. It later, from 1954 to 1957, led to my attributing over 30,000 early cents, thence to my collaborating with Sheldon on Penny Whimsy, published in 1958. It ultimately led to my writing the previous Encyclopedia, and the present book, to begin where Sheldon's had left off. Let me here publicly thank John Ford for making that meeting possible.
When the Early American Coppers club undertook to sponsor a project to update Penny Whimsy, all concerned took for granted that whatever it was to be called, the new cent book would retain much of Sheldon's approach, format, sequence (with corrections), and numerical grading. Perhaps this book would even retain some of his language, and (many hoped) some mathematical successor to his original "Science of Cent Values" equation, Market Price = Basal Value x Numerical Grade. Preferably, it would be in a size one could easily take to a convention. As recently as 1980, I might have been content with the update of Sheldon's work: Loring, et al., Early United States Cents (or whatever), third in the series whose first two volumes were Sheldon, et al., Early American Cents, and Sheldon, et al., Penny Whimsy. About then, Jack Collins began intensively trying to interest me in working on a series of encyclopedias, of which the Encyclopedia of United States Half Cents became the first volume, and the present book is the second. The larger project has had to do for the smaller.