Collecting
Throughout its history, the 1794 dollar has widely been considered one of the rarest and most valuable of all United States coins. In a September 1880 issue of The Coin Journal, the author noted that a good quality specimen of the 1794 dollar was valued at fifty dollars. In the early 1990s, numismatic historian Jack Collins estimated the surviving number of the coins to be between 120 and 130. In 2010, the finest known example, which was among the earliest coins struck and was prepared with special care, was sold in a private treaty sale for $7.85 million, the highest selling price of any coin in history. The dollar was graded Specimen-66 by the Professional Coin Grading Service, noting the special conditions under which it was struck. The coin, which had previously been owned by Colonel E.H.R. Green, was sold by Steven L. Contursi, president of Rare Coin Wholesalers, to the Cardinal Collection Educational Foundation of California. Contursi said that the coin was a "national treasure" and that he was proud to have been its "custodian" since 2003. Martin Logies, representative of the foundation that purchased the coin, said that of all the rarities he had seen, he believed that one was the "single most important of all".
Read more about this topic: Flowing Hair Dollar
Famous quotes containing the word collecting:
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“What pursuit is more elegant than that of collecting the ignominies of our nature and transfixing them for show, each on the bright pin of a polished phrase?”
—Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946)
“Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism—victimless collecting, as it were ... in a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage. The course of modern history having already sapped the traditions and shattered the living wholes in which precious objects once found their place, the collector may now in good conscience go about excavating the choicer, more emblematic fragments.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)