Nobody who's been a coin collector — I've happily engaged in numismatics myself — had to be reminded that 2009 was the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. That's because our faithful Lincoln cent, the American coin that holds the record for the longest time in production, has been around since a well-known collector's milestone, 1909, when it was introduced to commemorate Lincoln's centennial year.
The Lincoln cent replaced the Indian Head, which had been issued since 1859. When I was a coin-collecting kid in the late 1950s, an Indian Head still very occasionally could be found in pocket change. It was unusual, but not a stunner, to find a Lincoln cent going to back to the earliest years.
Before the Lincoln cent came along, American coins featured stylized images — the Indian, or the head of Liberty. Lincoln was the first actual person to be depicted. The designer was sculptor Victor David Brenner.
As first produced, the penny had Brenner's initials, VDB, inscribed on the reverse, along the bottom under the sheaves of wheat that were featured on the reverse side during the coin's first 50 years. (The wheat design was superseded in 1959 by the familiar image of the Lincoln Memorial.) But a consensus emerged that the initials, as small as they were, were too large. So a design change was made before the first year's production was completed. The initials were dropped.
Aha! Coin collectors love it when there's a variation in a design. It creates another category for which to search.
The basic identifying feature for a particular variety of coin is the year of production, the date shown on the coin. A second, crucial feature is the mint where the coin was made. That is shown with a mint mark — a letter such as "D" for Denver or "S" for San Francisco. (Or on some old-time coins, "C" for Charlotte.) The flagship U.S. mint, Philadelphia, traditionally has not been designated with a mark; the absence of a mark shows that the coin was Philadelphia-born.
In 1909, Lincoln cents were minted in Philadelphia and San Francisco. Given the switcheroo with Brenner's initials, there actually were four varieties: 1909 (plain), 1909-S, 1909 (plain) VDB, and 1909-S VDB. The latter, because of its scarcity, is the holy grail of Lincoln penny collectors.
I never found one, or knew anyone who did. That included the father of a friend of mine who was into coin collecting in a big way — so big that he'd go down to the main office of the U.S. Treasury and get $50 sacks of pennies to sort through. (One time I accompanied my friend and his dad into Washington on one of these coin runs. We went into the cashier's office at the Treasury building off 15th Street. The teller noticed my friend and I ogling his cash drawer — no wonder, because in the drawer's last slot was a stack of $1,000 bills. He asked us whether we'd like to see what $97,000 felt like, and we said sure. So he handed the big wad of green over for each of us to heft.)
These days a 1909-S VDB can be worth upwards of $1,000 if in excellent shape. The "plain" VDB wasn't as rare, but was still hard to find. One of my top collecting thrills, back when I often went through rolls of coins, was finding three 1909 VDBs in a single roll of pennies. And all three were in such good condition that they shone with what's known as mint lustre. How did they wind up in that roll?
The Lincoln penny's production waxed and waned in keeping with the country's prosperity or reflecting the onset of hard times. The Depression years yielded some scarce coins — the 1931-S was the rarest. In 1943, when copper was needed for the war effort, pennies were made of zinc. They looked silvery and were often called steel pennies.
A footnote on VDB: The designer's intials eventually were restored, on the front below Lincoln's shoulder, along the rim. But now they're so tiny that you pretty much need a magnifying glass to see them. I suppose that if you look and can't find 'em, you've got a valuable coin for sure!
