THE NUMISMATIC CONTRIBUTIONS OF BOB EVANS

Robert J. Galiette has been an E-Sylum subscriber since about 2000, and I finally had a chance to meet him in person at last week's Whitman Baltimore Coin Expo. I learned we have a mutual friend in Bob Evans, the history and numismatic expert for the organizations salvaging coins and bullion from the wreck of the S.S. Central America. Bob's study of the historical record and passenger accounts of the wreck helped guide the crew to the location of the site in the 1980s. As material was brought up from the ocean floor he painstakingly catalogued and later conserved and documented every last item. Earlier this year Bob set sail for a return trip to the site, where additional artifacts are being retrieved from the wreck site.

Rob's Gilded Age Collection of Double Eagles, which includes some great pieces from the S.S. Central America trove, will soon come up for auction at Stack's Bowers Galleries. He submitted the following thoughts for E-Sylum readers on Bob's contributions to numismatics. Hear, hear! -Editor

I’ve wanted people to understand how great a contribution Bob Evans has made to numismatics. He wrote some beautiful segments to the forthcoming Gilded Age Collection auction catalog by Stack’s Bowers, and wanted to contribute more, but he’s at sea with a 9pm to 9am shift every day, and he’s working virtually round-the-clock seven days a week there.

However, the entire hobby benefits from the valuable coincidence that Bob happened to live near Tommy Thompson in Ohio, and that a quarter of a century ago, over a six-pack as Bob has described it to me, Tommy recognized Bob’s special training and experience. Bob’s college education is as a scientist studying fossils through microscopic examination, and he trained with some of the best experts in the world.

Bob was able to apply his experience and education to use university library resources in Ohio to develop near pH-neutral solutions that could be prepared in batches and used at sea, where rocking and rolling on a ship otherwise would have created problems with harsher material to remove surface encrustations from coins -- which are deposits on a coin’s surface, versus actions that affect tarnish or toning, which are chemical reactions to a coin’s surface.

Bob’s contributions are all the greater when someone realizes that, as Dave Bowers reminds people, there’s no evidence of anyone saving and collecting circulation strike and branch mint double eagles during the early years when they were produced. The only way that Liberty Head double eagles were collected at all was as part of 6-coin and later 4-coin gold Proof sets. However, between 1859 and 1880 as few as only 20 to 30 Proof $20’s were coined in some years, and unsold Proofs either were placed into circulation or remelted. Dave Akers estimated that only 7 to 10 Proofs survive for some of these early years. A few $20 Proofs were produced in 1858, but only 3 or 4 are known.

Therefore, Bob’s careful methods secured for the hobby Type 1 $20’s from 1857 and earlier in numbers and in grades for which it had seemed no survivors ever would have been available. For example, 1857-S $20’s have become available in grades up to MS67 -- previously unheard-of for a Type 1 $20, and only recently collectable in that grade over a century-and-a-half after their production. The 1854-S S.S. Central America $20 in the Gilded Age Collection was the finest obtained from the San Francisco Mint’s first year of operation, and the lowest Liberty Head double eagle production year at that facility. It also may be one of only three mint state 1854-S $20’s not recovered from the S.S. Yankee Blade, which sank after hitting a submerged reef. Coins from the Yankee Blade have markedly etched or sandblasted surfaces as a result of sand and currents sifting over them for more than a century at the shallow depth of the shoals where they were located.

Thinking of Bob’s background and mine, people were joking in January at the F.U.N. show that a micropalenotologist and an immunopharmacologist were working to develop double eagle collecting.

However, we’ve been happy to bring attention to a series that never has been collected like any other type of United States coins. Up to this time, double eagles, if they were collected at all, were assembled as mixed agglomerations of a few Proofs with a few Mint State coins, and with a majority of worn circulation strikes comprising the bulk of a respective collection. The four greatest gold collections of Bass, Browning, Eliasberg and the Smithsonian’s National Numismatic Collection, for example, if put together have 114 different Mint State Liberty Head double eagles. The Gilded Age Collection has 122 different Mint State $20 Liberties (plus another 40 St. Gaudens $20’s) and is impressive to see in one group because of the similarity in appearance of the coins.

We’d like to inspire collectors to go beyond the mere numbers on plastic holders used to form registry sets, and pursue pure numismatics. There are many new horizons for collectors to reach. For example, after more than a century after Liberty Head double eagle production ceased in 1907, this is the first collection at auction to have a Mint State San Francisco Mint $20 Liberty for each of the 53 years in which a Liberty Head double eagle was produced there. Even more remarkable is that 150 years after their production, this is the first collection at auction to have even the ten paired P and S-Mint Civil War year 1861 through 1865 $20’s in Mint State.

I’d like to see someone add an 1886 $20 circulation strike in Mint State and be the first person in numismatic history to have a Mint State year set of all 58 consecutive years of Liberty Head double eagle production from 1850 through 1907 inclusive. There are at least three certified Mint State 1886 $20’s, but after two decades of searching I couldn’t find one. One of the last offered at auction was in a combined Stack’s and Dave Akers auction in 1988.

Similarly, if someone added an 1871-CC and an 1872-CC $20 in Mint State, it would produce the first collection to have all known certified Type 2 1866 through 1877 $20’s in Mint State (there being no known certified Mint State 1870-CC $20 at this time). The addition of an uncirculated 1859-P $20 would produce the first group of all paired Type 1 $20’s in Mint State. The Battle Born Collection auctioned in August 2012 was the first to have all known certified Mint State Carson City $20’s in one group.

People don’t have to think wistfully about what it was like to have been in numismatics a century ago in Farran Zerbe’s time. They can be persons of their own time -- go to the ANA, talk to someone like Dave Bowers, have him and others sign their book and auction catalog or, if so disposed, buy a coin plated in the book and have the page autographed. Some Mint State coins in the later Type 3 $20 years sell for only a small amount over bullion, which at the moment also has had a favorable buyer’s dip. Dave thinks that this year’s book, U.S. Liberty Head $20 Double Eagles: The Gilded Age of Coinage, is the most beautiful book that he’s written. In view of his unparalleled authorship, it’s a statement that keeps us motivated and focused in any associated work we do.

Bob writes:

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web