Centsy Manifesto

“This is Burma, and it is unlike any land you know about.” - Rudyard Kipling

Large cents are Rudyard Kipling’s Burma of coins. Stamped into these discs of copper is a 230-year tale of the human spirit, ego, intrigue, and deceit. To collect them is to collect the greatest coin story ever told. There has been no coin like them before and none since.

Part I: The Impossible Beginning

But you need proof. Let’s start with the fact that the United States Mint was authorized by Congress in 1792 and was already spitting out the first large cents in March of 1793. Months later a yellow fever pandemic hit Philadelphia and killed 10% of its population and displaced nearly half of the living who fled the city. In the midst of it all, the first professional engraver of the mint was lost to Yellow Fever, but not before designing the famous Liberty Cap Large Cent minted from 1793-1796. It’s Joseph Wright’s equivalent of Mozart’s Requiem (who passed, incidentally, less than 2 years prior).

Despite these challenge, in 1794 the mint managed to produce nearly a million large cents. But nothing about it was easy. Because they couldn’t harden the dies properly, they kept breaking and required constant refurbishing and replacing. It took 77 dies to make it through the year - 39 obverse and 38 reverse resulting in more than 58 unique combinations. Whatever the concerns of the mint that year, quality control was not among them. Missing fraction bars, letters spaced too far apart, letters spaced too close together, and uneven dates were common. Letters were even punched upside down and then re-punched correctly over top of the error in the hopes no one would notice and production could continue.

75 years later, the resulting varieties of this single year of large cents resulting from the goings-on at the mint in the late 1700s were systematically cataloged in a book by Dr. Edward Maris. But for fun, he gave them nicknames. A head with a larger than normal cheek became the “apple cheek.” Of course an academic wrote a very serious book about coins and then nicknamed them all. And many of these nicknames are still used today.

But collecting these variations with cute nicknames became a serious endeavor for a rag tag bunch in the late 1800s. These included a civil war hero, a bean baker in Boston (really), and a railroad baron among others. The large cents were now worth big money and in the late 1800s they were already selling for the modern-day equivalent of hundreds of dollars each. Some of the greatest collections of all time were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Part II: It All Comes Together and then Gets Weird

But even after 100 years of collecting and writing books on the collected, the biggest personality in large cents came in 1949. Dr. William Sheldon was a Eugenicist. He ran an experiment that photographed thousands of new university entrants to Ivy League schools naked and then took careful measurements of the nudes in the photos in order to develop a classification system to assign a 3 digit number to every person. It was incorrectly thought at the time that physique was correlated with psychology and the codification of body type could be used to predict everything from intelligence to mental illness. Yes - this really happened.

Then, between his publication of “The Varieties of Human Physique” in 1942 and “Atlas of Men,” which contained some of the aforementioned nude photos, Sheldon wrote “Early American Cents, 1793-1814”. And even more incredible is that he systematically analyzed the varieties of cents, categorized them into 295 varieties, then developed a numerical grading system for quality that is still used today.

But it gets crazier. Sheldon had access to a donated collection of large cents at the American Numismatic Society. Over time, he clandestinely swapped 129 large cents from his personal collection with superior quality cents from the ANA. He then sold his collection 4 years before his death with the theft going undiscovered. Once realized, a lawsuit ensued, but not before many of the coins had already been dispersed. While many of the coins have been returned (with the swapped coin in the collection given to the unwitting owner of the stolen coins), dozens of stolen coins remain missing.

Despite this twist in the large cent story, Sheldon’s 1949 Early American Cents and the more well-known Penny Whimsy of 1956 happened to coincide with the post-WW2 baby boom and captured the imagination of a new generation. The collecting world is still feeling the ripple effects of this today as some of the greatest large cent collections of our time have been assembled by those who were but precocious children in the 50s and 60s.

Part III: Cult Following and Provenance

In 1967, a club of large cent collectors was established as a hub for those interested in the hobby. Like the collectors who acquired large cents before a vaccine for yellow fever, before the transcontinental railroad, and before electricity, these collectors operated their network without the internet. It still exists today as the Early American Coppers Club with over 1,200 members.

Amazingly, as the best quality cents traded hands through the decades, meticulous records of prior owners were kept. These chains of custody now serve as a backdrop to the history of a nation - the owners and dates recorded for hundreds of these coins often traces American history back over a hundred years through the individual stories of their owners, each leaving a mark of their time with it in their possession with their biography serving as a time capsule to future generations tracing the journey of these coins over what will one day be be a 330+ year odyssey.

Conclusion: The Next Generation

Large cents aren’t the most accessible hobby because they are the three dimensional chess of coin collecting. While collecting other rare coins may be as straightforward as date, conditioning, and rarity; large cent collecting includes date, condition, rarity, variety, die state, provenance, and reading 100 books. There’s more required reading for the aspiring large cent collector than there is for today’s typical college freshman. Because of the vastness of the literature and varieties and the existence of a dedicated club, there’s not as much available to the would-be collector to begin the journey as, say, a new gold coin or silver dollar collector. There is a danger that the tradition of large cent collecting does not cross the intergenerational chasm while other segments of coin collecting are far better positioned to do so. It’s a tradition larger (and longer) than life itself and nearly as long as the United States.

Centsy is an effort to open you to this amazing world so that you may one day be a part of the greatest coin story ever told.