1859 Wide 9/8 Large Cent Dies

If you are going to start delving into the 9/8's, you need to get a copy of Rob Turner's "The 1858 Cents of Provincial Canada Volume 2" which has a complete die tracking/ID of all the known 1859/8's and how they came about. Haxby does not track the 9/8's. And if you are REALLY going to educate yourself on the Provincial '58 & '59 large cents, you need to Get Rob's "The 1858 Cents of Provincial Canada", which gives the entire history of How Canada was authorized to have coinage struck and how each of the master and matrix/submatrix dies were made. They also give a fairly accurate rarity guide to both dies and marriage pairs. Anyone that is going to take the long trek into the early cents needs to have both in their library. They can be ordered from Rob and his website, although the RCNA may have some as well. They are not cheap, but they are the only texts that cover how Canada coins came about and how to track the individual dies and marriages. You'll find Rob through his website through Google or he is "bosox" on this and other sites. There were, I think, 13 different Reverse dies for the 9/8's. The 9 that was used to overstrike the 1858 dies was a wider font than the other digits, so that the "9" was large enough to almost completely cover the 8 height. The 9/8's are an interesting study. The Volume 1 book above only covers the 1858's, while volume 2 covers the 9/8's

Reading this reminded me of a short blog piece I wrote a few years back on collecting 9/8's. One of the reasons I really like this group is that there are Obv die pairings from this group back to the 1858's and forward to the 1859's. It's a great group to sink your teeth into.

http://victorialargecents.blogspot....-wide-9.html