Help With 1850-O Dime

Maybe not quite in as good a grade as I thought, but still close. Beware, the next will be a little controversial.

For this issue - both Seated dimes and Seated half dimes - you have to take most of your grading cues from the obverse, as too little sharp detail exists in the reverse design to see fine grading graduations, and I'm a firm believer in the fact that it's pretty difficult to wear down a coin on only one side. A further consideration is that strike quality can have a bearing on some of this.

The very first place you'll see wear on one of these is on Liberty's right (viewer's left) leg. Not relevant here; we know it's circulated and once we decide that, the leg exits the equation. After that, look at the hair (a good place for strike quality to make me a liar), the cap atop the pole, the stars and the shield. At XF or better I want the shield lines and LIBERTY to be fully sharp. At XF45 or better I want all star detail still there (Strike: You're a liar). If the hair is well-struck to begin with, I need most of that hair detail remaining for XF40 and above AU50 I want it all, with only detail flattening, not missing. The cap itself is another strike-related thing where you have to decide how well it has been struck before deciding how much is gone (see the recurring theme? Strikes are ornery, they like calling you a liar). At best there's only a couple of lines in there anyway.

Further, you have to be harder on the smaller coins than the larger; for Seated quarters and Halves (same obverse, different reverse) I'm usually a grade level above - maybe more - a Dime or Half Dime. Be hard on these. Smaller coins are easier to strike well; I'm more ready to make allowances for strike on the larger issues.

That's enough detail for this one, and in this specific case I'm most worried about the stars and the shield. Especially the shield. Based on your words and what I see of the shield - is the Y in LIBERTY actually missing detail? - I'm thinking XF40 is where this one tops out. The two stars missing detail are not the ones where I expect strike to become involved - that should happen on the lower ones. Look on the other face of the coin - the topmost 4 of the stars correspond to a place where there's relatively little reverse detail, and in the striking process that means they'll be the easiest to "fill" because there's less competition for that metal on the other face. The other stars compete with the reverse lettering for the metal, and will weaken earlier.

Nothing changes the fact that this issue is given too little credit for its' actual rarity.

That was only to explain my thinking regarding why your weak stars were wear and not strike, of course. If the coin were clearer and of higher grade, I'd have confounded you considerably more.

Yeah, I have searched and searched and cannot find many pictures at all to compare it to. The reverse of the head and stars is way more defined than the obverse.

I wish that there was a coin shop in my town. The closest one is almost to Memphis which is about 1 1/2 away from Tupelo.

I think I might stop by there next time I am on my way to play poker in Tunica and let them look at it with their equipment and see what they have to say. Either way, I am glad that I picked this particular coin up.

That, too, because once the coin starts getting well into the AU range we have to seriously start thinking about strike quality, and for that I have to make you pretend I didn't say the reverse was unimportant.

But that would have been a very_long_post.

Pics, you say? Wander over to Heritage Auctions (ha.com). Register, it's free and they won't ask for financial info. Then you get access to their archives, two million coin sales going back to 1990 with ridiculously high-resolution images. They have over 17,000 Seated dimes alone.

And only 29 1850-O's. See what I mean about your coin?

$15? Um, yeah, that wasn't a half-bad deal.

Well, that's kind of droolworthy.

See the completely sharp shield on BH1964's coin? Required for high XF or better. See the right side stars, by comparison to the left? Strike.

Now is where you you wander over to the reverse, and note that to an extent the right-side leaves are slightly weaker (especially at the bottom) than the left. The dies were not perfectly parallel. And on smaller Minors, this effect is magnified, like all die placement effects because they're so much smaller and so much less metal is involved. Strike is a larger factor in evaluating Minors than larger issues.

This is where I differ from some in grading. Grading is subjective by nature, of course, but it's my subjective opinion that I should grade as objectively as possible. Therefore, I need first to evaluate strike, and if strike is a factor on any face of the coin it puts the onus upon me to grade the coin based on the best this specific coin could have been.

The conventional wisdom in numismatics is that the lesser-graded face decides the grade. It's wise because it's conservative, and I teach it here.

But I don't believe it.

Graders wave off any disparity in apparent grade between faces, never considering the fact that coins wear equally on both faces. To me, any apparent grade disparity between faces - on the order of 5 grading points or better - is a red flag telling me I have to think harder, and in cases like that I'm likely to grade based on the better face, as long as I can come up with logical evidence that the other face demonstrates an older die or weaker strike.

TPG's will do this too, but only when the disparity is so great that it slaps you in the face.

It's only when you adopt this mindset that you start seeing how truly wide the range of die wear and strike artifact is among examples of any given issue. And why would you punish a coin of lesser strike by saying it has more wear?

That is the perfect mindset for a numismatist. For the moment we'll call yours XF40 pending better images. We have a Photography Forum to help you with that.

Nice coin to start. I keep away from most coins like that since not really easy to come by. And usually the prices are rather high.