SEATED HALF DIME LITERATURE

The marathon trip thus turned into a long weekend vacation, which included some time at the American Numismatic Society, where I was able to review the literature related to Liberty Seated half dimes.

The action begins in 1883, with Harold P. Newlin’s A Classification of the Early Half-Dimes of the United States. Published by John Haseltine in Philadelphia, this volume was a natural extension of Haseltine’s earlier (1881) Type Table, which enumerated die varieties of silver dollars, halves, and quarters.

The Type Table, while a starting point, did not comprehensively cover the Liberty Seated varieties, and, sad to say, Newlin did not do much better. Nor did he even make the pretense – “I do not propose to give all the varieties of the later Half-dimes,” he wrote, “for there are many, and differ so little, that it would make this article too voluminous. I leave this field for those, who, I hope, will write more at length upon this subject, and will content myself by naming only a few of the important varieties.” And that is precisely what he did, confining discussion of Liberty Seated half dimes to the major design types. With printing limited to one hundred copies, the Newlin work is thus a more appealing item to the literature specialist, than to the collector attempting seated half dime attribution.

The record goes silent until 1927, when Will W. Neil published a short article in the August, 1927 Numismatist, followed with an addenda in the December issue noting a few later discoveries. Neil’s effort is the first serious attempt at scaling the Liberty Seated half dime variety summit.

He gives descriptions of about a hundred varieties, perhaps reaching only the base camp but at least getting started. There are no plates here, and like the Beistle half dollar study of the same period, this is problematic for the collector. Some of these varieties are hard to attribute even with plates!

Wayne Homren, Editor

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web