According to the
Red Book about Classic Head Large Cents
"This group (1808 - 1814) does not compare in sharpness and quality to those struck previously (1793 - 1807) nor to those struck later (from 1816 on).
The copper used was softer, having more metallic impurity.
This impaired the wearing quality of the series.
For this reason, collectors find greater difficulty in obtaining these dates in choice condition."
I recently hunted down a Classic Head Large Cent that I could afford and was kind of baffled at the prices those I would have rather owned were so high. I would not be too hard on your coin, it is very common to find pitted corroded examples, but yours has a lot of detail remaining. None of the dates are dirt cheap in Good and they jump considerably in prices at choice VG.
These large cents are just tough to hunt down looking great in the lower grades.
I would think that the inferior copper used also made these more susceptible to pitting and corrosion.
You say it looks better in hand. That's a good thing.
My guesstimate is that you have a
Corroded Plain 4 VG10 Details Large Cent.
I looked at a lot of these last month and yours is not so bad.
Posted 07/19/2010 08:01 am
