I Throw Down The Gauntlet. The Age Of Modern Coinage Is Over

The designs and the order of issue are different. The six coins that were an afterthought (and perhaps technically a lone series of their own) are now integrated into a single 56 coin series that honors sites of national interest (as opposed to images of local interest as the previous series' did). Instead of six coins in the final year, this series will run for 11 years (5 coins in each) plus one coin in the twelfth year.

It is an interesting article on how you grouped them by years and why. I can pretty much agree with the years you selected.

I heard the reason why no 1982 mint sets were minted, was because they thought they were losing money on them. So they stopped making them for 1982 and 1983.

Also, in 1982, the cent changed composition to reduce costs, so that is another reason why 1982 is a good year to start the postmodern era.

So will we enter a new era if the cent is no longer minted and if the composition changes for the other coins? Maybe call it the too expensive to mint or over inflation era? :-D

From a collector's perspective, the golden age never ended and it is stronger now, more so, than ever. And I think the modern era still exists, since we still can find quite a few of those coins in circulation, today. At least for the post silver ones. The silver ones were removed for their value, not because the era has ended.

And for the silver War Nickels, I don't think it was for a planned obsolescence, but instead for recovering valuable metal to pull them out of circulation easier. At least for once, they actually thought ahead!

Charles, great article and well thoughtout viewpoint as always.

@Clair: close but not quite apocalyptic yet! I think the new era is "The End of Money" as we know it. More transactions are electronically processed than ever before. There'll be a few that will be the holdouts and hoard physical money, but the slippery slope towards the death of money has already started. Have you seen more than a handful of ATB Quarters recently? All that's being churned out now are countless pennies, nickels and dimes, and it feels like the dying rattle of fiat coinage as we currently know it. That day is not long in coming, no longer an "if" but "when?" Coins will only be made as collectibles for people that remember using them as nostalgia for a generation or two, and that too, will eventually disappear as lost remnants of an archaic time.

Interesting article. Speaking as someone who was a theatre major I object a bit to the phrase "postmodern coinage" (to me, "postmodern" is No Exit, where the final line of the play just socks you in the gut--helloooo, existentialism!), but I've had similar thoughts, set at a slightly later date (roughly 1995--although, I don't tend to include commemoratives, so I may be a bit late to the party) and under a different name ("digital coinage"). Please forgive me, I'm about to whip out a pop-culture reference to explain my thoughts on this change in design . . .

. . . remember the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie in 2003, and that stupid ten-minute scene where Elizabeth is getting chased all around the ship by undead pirates? The scene that could have been, I dunno, nine minutes shorter and still have had the same impact? The scene they kept when an important scene between Jack and Elizabeth--a scene you could actually call "pivotal," if you take the second movie into account--was cut right out, when another scene that developed their time together was--not cut, but certainly neutered? That stupid, who-on-earth-was-drunk-when-they-watched-the-dailies-and-approved-this scene?

I thought that scene was the stupidest thing Disney had done since they decided Pete's Dragon was a good idea. Then I got to college and made friends with a few animation majors, and found out that scene was actually hugely important: it was showing off new technology, and doing it in the flashiest way possible. For the first time ever, it was possible to use motion-capture on a large enough scale to show the minutiae--you can see the pirates' ribs move when they breathe. The way they move is natural, not jerky. You can see the tatters of their clothes wavering in the breeze and the way bones and tendons actually move under that nice pretty skin coating they've got. All of that--each and every single bit of it--was so new at the time that had they tried to film that scene even two years earlier, it would have failed. (Consider Titanic, released in 1999--people were injured during filming because the stuff sliding across the deck as the ship sank was actually, really sliding across the deck. There was not yet a way for even James Cameron--he who would come back ten years later with the ridiculous CGI extravaganza that was Avatar--to realistically render stuff like a falling grand piano.)


I see coins like the better-done Staties (e.g. Nevada as opposed to Pennsylvania; Arizona as opposed to Wyoming) and their sister-coins, the ATB Quarters, as being like that scene in Pirates--except in this case, they're not showing off motion-capture and CGI. They're showing off digital engraving technology. The storytellers at Disney didn't get magically better (or worse); they got new technology. Likewise, the artists at the Mint didn't magically get better (or worse); they got new technology. Imagine if the artist who designed the IHC had had access to what we have now--in my head I see an Indian wearing a feathered headdress made up of micro-lettering saying things like "LIBERTY" and "FREEDOM" and "E PLURIBUS UNUM" to go along with the lettered headband. It's not that the IHC is simplistic or ugly or what have you (it's actually my favourite coin design); it's that with digital technology, the artist could have gotten even more insanely detailed.

That's part of the reason (in my opinion) that we've gotten these "series" coins--the folks at the Mint want to play with their shiny new toys, and if this is the result, who can blame them? The saying goes that "form follows function," but I think the reverse is also true--function follows form, and ever-more-detailed coins will be the function of an ever-more-detailed digital program. You wouldn't use digital engraving and programming to carve, say . . . the bust of Lincoln on our current penny (it's a lovely bust, but compare its detail to the aforementioned IHC). It'd be a waste. Likewise, thought follows function--you no longer have to "think simple" if you have the tools to think complicated.

The question, then, is whether or not the Mint will put this to good use--they went wild with the Staties and I think they're paying the price (I could easily put together a roll of Nebraska UNC from my cash drawer . . . any day of the week . . . and they come in mixed rolls), namely, a glut of coins. Hopefully with the ATB they'll be wiser, but the fact that they went from one elaborate series straight to another does not give me hope for that.