1859 Dp9 Varieties Question

try coinsandcanada

What's a DP9#8 ... never heard of it. Which DP is it? .... picture? I co-wrote the Vicky variety section for Charlton for the 2011 book and never heard of a #8. Also, don't believe any of the prices on the CoinsandCanada site. I think that I have every 1859 variety known.

That 9 is not one that we included in Charlton's 65th edition in the back. Technically speaking, every single 1859 is a repunched 9, so that there would be well over 100 different reverse varieties. The final digit 8 was ground off the hub of the still-usable 1858 hubs/matrix and all new working dies were made with 185_ dates. The final digit 9 was hand-punched into each working die, the final 9 taking 2, 3, 4 whacks to fully impress the punch into the die. Each whack may have been days or weeks apart, since the punch had to be hardened and the die annealed (softened) before each evolution.

Based upon the other similar offset 9's that we did come up with a full-retail price on, I would say that yours would have a 15-20X premium on it ... for a regular coin that retailed at $5, the variety would be worth $75-100 full retail. Since you can normally buy most Canadian coins for 50% or so of book value, I'd say that you could get $40-50 F-15 to VF-20. I'm just a variety collector/rersearcher and not a die-tracker that uses the Haxby system. That specific reverse working die may be quite scarce, but I don't use that system.