“The boy without hesitation sung the song, and acquitted himself to admiration. When I arose to return home, I took out a ten cent piece and was about to present it to the child, but in doing so, it accidentally dropped on the floor, and the boy and I looked for it in vain.” — Anne Newport Royall, Mrs. Royall’s Pennsylvania, or Travels Continued in the United States, 1829 Warm golden toning shadows the silver gray devices of this frosty treat, the whole bounded by richer blue at the extreme peripheries. With its superlative aesthetic appeal and equally strong strike, this ideally represents the date or design type. The fields are fresh, satiny, and essentially pristine, free of any notable hairlines or marks. A single die crack runs from the bottom of the drapery through the right side of 8 in the date to the rim below. No other cracks or clashes are present. While other specimens of the Medium 10C variety may have been graded a point higher, it is difficult to imagine surpassing this coin’s overall quality. Chosen for the exceptional type sets built by James Swan and Oliver Jung, the latter dispersed in a record-setting auction by American Numismatic Rarities in 2004, this coin represents the design type ideally and also ranks as one of the finest known of this die variety. The Lovejoy coin, cited as the finest from these dies by the authors of the JR book, was not this nice. Most high grade specimens of the Medium 10C category are from these dies; the other Medium 10C variety, JR-11, is considerably scarcer in high grade. Only five 1829 dimes of all varieties have ever been graded higher than MS-66 by PCGS. PCGS# 84511. NGC ID: 2378.
