Walter Breen
Two months later, Dr. Edward Maris, the Philadelphia Quaker physician, published a small pamphlet, Varieties of the Copper Issues of the United States Mint in the Year 1794. This first work by Maris described 39 varieties. A second edition followed in 1870, describing four more cent varieties. Only 100 copies of each were printed. Instead of expensive and difficult photographic illustrations, these monographs assigned a name to each variety, evidently as a mnemonic. Ten years later, Edouard Frossard's Monograph (described below) could still allude on page 12 to Maris, "whose happy nomenclature, in the description of the 1794 cents, has generally been adopted by collectors." Decades later, collectors were still using these names, though certain later monographs (Frossard-Hays, Elder-Hays, and Chapman, below) dropped them. For sentimental reasons, Dr. Sheldon included the names in his descriptions.
The next book to say anything important about cents was Edouard Frossard's Monograph of United States Cents and Half Cents, Issued Between the Years 1793 and 1857 ... Sheldon cherished this book for its descriptions of the "general classes" (designs) of cents, though he anglicized its author's name to "Edward." Frossard's descriptions of 1793 cents followed Crosby's (above). Those of 1794 were loosely based on Maris, although renumbered. Thirty "Monograph numbers" comprised 30 obverses with 11 extra reverses-including a few not in the Maris pamphlet (though, by then, Maris had discovered still others he did not describe). Frossard's treatment of later dates was perfunctory, his variety descriptions of little use. However, this book at least had the advantage of nine heliotype plates, so that collectors could at last accurately associate some of their 1794s with their Maris names and their Frossard numbers. (The Monograph text's passages relevant to 1793-1794 are reproduced in Monographs on Varieties of United States Large Cents, 1793- 1794 edited by John W. Adams.)
Possibly in rivalry with this effort, David Proskey began a serial, "The Coins of the United States," in J. W. Scott's Coin Collector's Journal, 1879-1883. Proskey went through half cents and large cents; his promise to continue with the other denominations was, for unknown reasons, never carried out. Because other varieties had been turning up in the meantime, the cent serial was anonymously revised under the new title "The Cents of the United States, Second Series," in the 1887-1888 issues. Scott folded the Journal in December 1888, with the serial incomplete. Sheldon and others long assumed that this revision was Proskey's work. However, a set of the Journal 1876-88 recently turned up (This set was offered in George Frederick Kolbe's literature auction, December 2, 1984, lot 79.) with an autographed notation on the flyleaf of volume IX: "I began writing this publication with this number and wrote it through to the end. F. W. Doughty, Ramapo, N. J., Nov. 27, 1901." (This notation seemingly indicates that Francis Worcester Doughty edited the Journal from 1884 through 1888. Doughty was a writer of adventure books for boys and motion picture scripts; his favorite numismatic specialty was not cents, but coins depicting elephants.) Doughty reprinted and completed the Coin Collector's Journal serial (after a fashion) under his own name in The Cents of the United States: A Numismatic Study. Extensively Illustrated from Selected Specimens. His descriptive methods were very difficult to use, requiring (like Maris's) not only a ruler, but also a protractor. Regrettably, his" extensive illustrations" proved to be a few inaccurate engravings-evidently Scott was unable or unwilling to pay the cost of the needed photographic plates. Nevertheless, for many decades, Doughty numbers for 1795-1814 were the only ones available; fortunately, nobody needed them for 1793-1794. Until after World War II, they were still in use for cents of 1795, 1797, 1800, and 1804-1814.
The next entry was yet another updating of Maris on 1794: Edouard Frossard and William Wallace Hays, Esq., Varieties of the United States Cents of the Year 1794. (Number of copies printed is disputed: Thomas L. Elder, 44th Sale, October 12-13, 1910, p. 77, claimed 1,000 were printed; John W. Adams says 300. A reprint is in the Adams anthology; above.) This had the huge advantage of two photogravure plates illustrating every variety (then 56 compared to Maris's original 39), from the Hays collection which was believed complete, though the work offered only a partly rational emission sequence, and without a rarity scale. Though two of the Hays numbers (38 and 53) proved to be errors, the Frossard-Hays descriptions were nevertheless a great improvement over previous efforts for 1794 cents. Hays numbers became the standard for decades. Even in the 1970s, Dr. Sheldon was still using them, and a few older collectors still do; such is the force of habit.
Meanwhile, Sylvester Sage Crosby again took up the 1793s. In a series of articles in the American Journal of Numismatics (1896) he went into the historical background of the cents of this date in something like the thoroughness of scholarly detail which he had lavished on colonial coins in his masterpiece, Early Coins of America (Boston: the author, 1875.) Fearing that federal snoops might forbid him to illustrate the varieties on photographic plates (even as they had forbidden the Chapman brothers to do with the M. A. Brown auction in 1897), (Several sets of photographic plates for this catalogue are now known, originally photographed on large-size negatives for what was intended to be a large-format Chapman catalogue. These were prototype plates, and did not bear lot numbers adjacent to the large cents, nor any imprint of) Crosby made his variety descriptions as detailed and unambiguous as possible: a model for all later efforts. However, in the authorities' eyes, halftone plates of obsolete coins seemed less an alleged threat to the stability of the currency than photographic contact prints. Crosby went ahead and made up three such plates to accompany his descriptions. Slightly revised, all this material was reprinted in book form the next year: S. S. Crosby, The United States Coinage of 1793 Cents and Half Cents. Descriptions of the Various Dies Bearing That Date, With Notes on the Establishment of the Mint (Only 200 copies were printed; several later reprints exist, including that in the Adams anthology, above.) Crosby's numbers remained standard for over 50 years, until the Sheldon book appeared. Dr. Sheldon himself habitually used them, as do some collectors even today; A testimony to the thoroughness of Crosby's research: only one of his varieties proved to be an error. (Crosby 3-B, admittedly described from an electrotype copy of an unavailable coin, which proved to be a fraudulent alteration.) No new varieties of 1793 appeared for 80 years, until R. E. Naftzger, Jr.'s December 1977 discovery of a new Liberty Cap obverse.
A dozen years later, coin dealer Thomas L. Elder published a sheaf of loose notes by Ebenezer Gilbert on the varieties of 1796, photographically illustrating them from Gilbert's own collection. For decades, this incomplete and ill-organized concoction remained, for lack of anything else, the standard text: The Varieties of the United States Cents of 1796. (300 copies printed.) Dr. Sheldon claimed that Gilbert "good-naturedly protested that he never intended that material to be published, since he knew it to be both incomplete and in some respects inaccurate."(Penny Whimsy, p. 22.) Elder later issued several supplements describing new numbers, the first (three varieties) sometime before July 1910, as it is mentioned at lot 395 of his 42nd Sale, July 21, 1910. Dr. George P. French, Whom Sheldon used to call "the jolly abortionist," got into the act by assigning "Gilbert" numbers above 40 to some of his own coins that he fondly believed were new varieties. The resulting mess took nearly 40 years to clear up, presenting Clapp and Newcomb with possibly their most difficult task.