Saturday, April 23, 2011

The Last 1859 over 8, or That Final Wide 9

It came this week.  The last 1859 over 8 that I needed to complete my set.  According to “The 1858 Cents of Provincial Canada, Vol. II”  by Rob Turner, there are 12 known different reverses and 13 known different obverses that make up a set of wide 9 over 8’s.  They combine to yield 18 coin pairings.  That is a complete set.  Charlton highlighted 3 of this group in 65 Edition, in the large cent variety section.

The coin that came this week is an RD8/OG2.  It was the last one I needed to complete the set.  It’s a nice one too!  I had only seen 1 other but I was not quick enough to snag it.  To get this one, I traded a scarce 1858 die pairing variety for it.  I think that trading may well be a great avenue to secure some of the scarcer die pairings.  I like to keep traders of the more difficult coins from any given year.  In doing so, I have coins to trade with that someone may well need and want.  This takes me back years to when I was a kid with a mitt full of hockey cards.  Playing “got ‘em, got ‘em, need ‘em” in the school playground before school started, trading for the more difficult cards to get, all the while chewing on a huge wad of gum.

Although my set is complete, a couple of the coins are lower grade so I’m still on the hunt for better examples for a few of them.  I’ll keep the hard to find ones and put them in my trader stash as I continue to upgrade the group.

I’ve become quite enamored with the wide 9 over 8’s as a group.  Besides the challenge of collecting the 12 reverses, there is lots happening on the obverse side of the coin.  Some of those obverses are also paired with 1858’s and 1859 narrow 9’s.  Turner has identified and published the obverses that match to the 58’s and Haxby, who is currently studying and publishing work on 1859’s, has identified and published 9/8 obverses that show up on narrow 9’s.  What an exciting group!  I’ll clearly extend my collection and push both to 58’s and narrow 9’s in order to obtain an example of each obverse die pairing across these groups.

If you are collecting 9/8’s the same way I am, let me know.  This is a fantastic series on which to cut some variety teeth.