WHITMAN FOLDER PRINTING PLATES

I'm attaching images of two printing plates that were made for Whitman blue folders in the mid-1960s. I acquired these from different sources. The Seated Liberty Dime plate was purchased last week on eBay for a very modest price. The Seated Half Dollar folder cost me a lot more, as I traded a pristine North Carolina colonial note for it about 12-15 years ago. The owner wouldn't sell the plate for cash, but he asked what I had to trade that was of historic interest.

The story behind these plates is that they were intended for use with Whitman's Sixth Edition of folders printed during 1965-67 (these "editions" are defined by my own cataloging and were not so-called by Whitman). The Sixth Edition is identifiable by the eagle logo which appears at lower left on the cover of each folder. Since the coin market was in the dumper at that time, Whitman found that it didn't need to print any more examples of these slow-selling titles. In fact, all Whitman folders for Seated Liberty coins were discontinued at that time, and none are known with the Sixth Edition graphics seen on these plates.

The dealer who traded me the half dollar folder said that he'd received it probably during the late 1970s as a thank-you gift from Whitman that was sent to all of the company's bigger wholesalers of coin products. Printing technology was changing at that time, so they would never be used in any case. How many were sent out and how many of those still exist are unknown but, needless to say, I'm a buyer of all I can get.

My plan is to have prints made from these plates and bind or tip them into my projected book on Whitman folders, which I estimate will be Volume Three of my current series on coin albums. Of course, this may be contingent on selling more copies of Volume One, since I'm yet a long way from recovering its cost.

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
NEW BOOK: COIN COLLECTING ALBUMS, VOLUME ONE (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n32a02.html)
NEW BOOK: THE NATIONAL COIN ALBUM AND RELATED PRODUCTS (www.coinbooks.org/esylum_v16n41a04.html)

Wayne Homren, Editor

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