Charlton Monograph 1 Large Cent Variety Guide

I am assisting a Vicky large cent researcher into Vicky varieties for 1893, by furnishing 50-60 '93 coins to increase his populations. It has come to my attention that he, as many more of you MAY, has been using a cross-reference to Griffin numbers as put forth in the Charlton reprint/update of Griffin's Vicky studies called "Monograph 1". Here is a cut-and-paste that I just wrote to members of a private coin site of which I am a member. Please heed the warning about EVER using any photos from Monograph 1 to ID your large cent coins.

" Although we tried to warn/notify as many collectors as possible about the accuracy of Charlton's reprint of the Jack Griffin research on Victoria large cent varieties, I see that the cautions now are NOT known by everyone, since most of our warnings are now 6-8 year's old. So here it goes again. You CAN NOT use the photos in the Charton Monograph 1 to ID/match any of your coins. From the time of Jack's death until Charlton purchased the rights to Griffin's work to reprint, as Bill Cross had promised to Jack, there was a mismatch between the photos and the descriptions as written. Brian Cornwell from ICCS took all the photos and Jack had expanded his research to include more coins and ID's. Somewhere along the line, the photos on the disc got matched to the wrong descriptions.

Rob, Dan, Jim and I (after we had finished the 2011 65th Charlton on Vicky large cent varieties) took the Charlton Monograph 1 and correctly matched as many of the photos on photo disc to the verbiage/written descriptions in the Charton reprint book. The Monograph One included more varieties and coins than did the original 1992 research and now had photos, of which the original paper had no photos. The Monograph 1, as published and on the street was rife with errors .. the book CAN NOT be used to match any photo to correctly ID a coin to the proper Griffin number. We submitted pages and pages of corrections to Bill Cross at Charlton, but no updated information was published .. it cost a lot of money to have a book hit the street. We were told that, when all the copies on the shelves had sold, then they would issue a new edition. That was 9 years ago and Bill Cross has sold Charlton to someone else. I am just letting you all know about the dangers of using the Monograph 1 as an ID guide ... you CAN use the words and written descriptions .. just don't use the photos. Some of the date groupings in the Monograph had nearly 80% errors in the photo matching. Beware!

I am bringing this up again, because a member of our group here is conducting a large comprehensive research paper on the 1893 large cents. I loaned him 50-60 of my 1893's for his paper and just got an email that matched what he was finding to Griffin numbers, as delineated in Monograph 1, not the original Griffin 1992 work. Now he has some rewriting to do, but at least it was caught before going to print. As I stated above, when we finished writing the 2011 variety guide in the back of the Annual Charlton guide, we submitted all the corrections that we could find and they are at Charlton, gathering dust for 8 years. We DID NOT check for the accuracy of Charlton's Monograph 3, which covers the Edward and George large cents, so I would not trust the photos in there, as well."

Research all you want on any variety/error topic, but be sure and confident that the underlying reference material/resource is accurate. I can name you 2 reference books out right now on Canadian varieties that have 11' pole marks all over them. Be careful what you use for reference material!