Walter Breen
The next act in the drama once again concerned 1794. Its title page credited the longest list of co-producers of all: Varieties of United States Cents of the Year 1794, Described and Illustrated by Ed. Frossard and W. W. Hays, Illustrated from the magnificent cent collection of E. Gilbert, Esqr., of New York City, and reprinted, with additional numbers, by Thos. 1. Elder of N. Y. City (Another reference with 300 copies printed. Four plates. Reprinted in the Adams anthology, above.) This 1910 work is commonly called Elder-Bays or, alternatively, Elder-Gilbert; Frossard was in no position to object, as he had died in 1899. Elder gave the three new varieties Hays numbers 57-59, respectively the "Gilbert," "Chapman," and "Steigerwalt" varieties. He offered Gilbert's 1794 cents in his 44th Sale, October 12-13, 1910, lots 1 to 59, numbered to correspond with the Hays numbers, even unto borrowing lot 59 from Newcomb for exhibit, but not for sale. Not all of these coins were pictured in Elder-Hays; Elder had instead used, besides Newcomb's "Hays 59," Henry Clay Miller's specimens of Hays 6, 8, 22, 29 and 46, because Gilbert's specimens (in the Elder auction) were of lower grade. There was no Hays 30 in the collection, and the error numbers 38 and 53 were skipped.
In an 18-part serial in The Numismatist, the Philipsburg, Pennsylvania physician, Charles E. McGirk, issued his life work, "United States Cents and Die Varieties 1793-1857." (The entirety is reprinted in the Lapp and Silberman anthology, above.) McGirk apparently intended book-length republication, but none followed. McGirk numbers occasionally appeared on cents in auctions and old collections, but for various reasons (among others, numerous errors, lack of a meaningful sequence, listing die cracks as new varieties, and lack of usable illustrations) the system was forgotten. Later monographs ignored the McGirk numbers. McGirk's work, if better done, might have replaced the Doughty reference.
In what surely sounded and looked like a deliberate snub to Elder-Hays, Samuel Hudson Chapman issued a rival monograph, The United States Cents of the Year 1794. George H. Clapp denounced the book's numerous errors at such length and detail that Chapman withdrew it, unintentionally creating a rarity for today's numismatic literature collectors. I have seen only one copy in over 40 years. A second edition followed in 1926, with some (not nearly all) errors corrected. Not only did Chapman disregard the Hays sequence, his preface sneered at it: "Photography has made the old descriptive method obsolete. I have, for instance, never used Frossard's text leaves in my old copy are still uncut ... The text is only a list identifying one die from another by details without any historical information or critical comments, with the various styles of execution and fabric in confusion." All absolutely true; and to drive the point home, Chapman's four plates are of far higher quality than plates in any previous monograph. (In a September 10, 1997 note to the editor, Dave Bowers noted that Chapman photographed the coins under water! No further details are available.) (See the reprint in the Adams anthology, above). However, dealers largely ignored the new Chapman numbers, and collectors preferred to go on using Hays numbers. Only rarely do Chapman numbers turn up on older collections' original envelopes.
In the meantime, the department store executive Howard Rounds Newcomb culminated a decade of research with his monograph The United States Cents of the Years 1801-1802-1803. (Only 100 printed.) Here, thanks to unlimited funds, the quality of the five photographic plates matched the accuracy of the text, far above anything in the field since Crosby, and setting a standard matched thereafter in cent publications only by his fellow tycoon George H Clapp, below. (Editor's note: The photographic cent publications by William C. Noyes along with John D. Wright's photographically illustrated work on the cents of 1816-1839 didn't appear until after the author was terminally ill and thus were not cited by Breen.) In 1931, Newcomb issued two supplementary plates describing new varieties; only three more varieties (all 1801) have shown up since. Text and plates (without supplements) are conveniently reprinted in Monographs on Varieties of United States Large Cents 1795-1803.
George H. Clapp, Alcoa founder-president, philanthropist, and conchologist largely devoted himself to cents following his retirement. The superb first fruit of his research was The United States Cents of the Years 1798-1799. (Only 135 printed. Reprinted in the Loring anthology, above.) In format, and overall quality of text and plates, this was an explicit companion to the Newcomb mono-graph on the cents of 1801-1802:-1803, aimed at the same perfectionists who had snapped up the latter. No new die or combination of 1798 has appeared in the ensuing 66 years.
Three years later, Clapp compiled a brief study of the second decade cents: "The United States Cents, 1804-1814." (Pamphlet reprints exist.) His numbers remained standard until Sheldon's work appeared; there are no new varieties of these years, and one of the former numbers (Doughty 223) proved to be a fraud-which had fooled Doughty and McGirk.
This left only the dates 1795-1797 and 1800. Clapp and Newcomb's collaboration on these was interrupted during the final manuscript stages by Newcomb's death on January 7, 1945. Clapp put the finishing editorial touches on it, and the result appeared as The United States Cents of the Years 1795, 1796, 1797 and 1800. (Large quantities of this edition were still available from the ANS as late as the mid 1970s, when First Coinvestors, Inc. acquired the remnants of the hoard for $7 a copy.) This was consciously in the manner of their 1925 and 1931 mono-graphs, but not quite as successful. Substantial grounds exist for disagreement with their emission sequences for 1796-1797 and 1800; and new varieties of all four years have continued to appear.
It remained for Sheldon to combine and update all these researches in his own volume Early American Cents. (2,500 copies printed. M. H. Sheldon was Dr. Sheldon's whimsical name for his typewriter!) Exemplifying the late Count Alfred Korzybski's aphorism "We all stand on dead men's shoulders," Sheldon began exactly where Crosby, Chapman, Clapp, and Newcomb had left off, deviating only slightly from the Clapp and Newcomb variety emission sequences(mostly in 1796), and to a somewhat larger extent from Chapman's in 1794. Though I have already sung this historic book's praises at length, let me mention another satisfying feature. Its collotype plates at once formed a mating diagram illustrating his chosen emission sequence, and invited closer examination with a magnifying glass (unlike normal halftone illustrations, which explode into an unrecognizable pattern of dots when magnified), while not adding nearly so much to cost or book weight-as the same number of glossy photographic plates.
Everything new published on cents between then and the present volume could be construed as revisions or commentaries on that first Sheldon book; and prior to the hundred-odd issues of Penny-Wise and R. W. Julian's series of articles (below), many of the most important ones were in auction catalogues. This is not the place to list even the hundred most important such articles in detail, or to name the hundred best catalogues. However, the Homer K. Downing Collection in the 1952 ANA Convention catalogue was the first major auction of 1793-1814 cents following the publication of the Sheldon book, and, inevitably, it became the first test of how accurately Sheldon's book values reflected the actual cent market. The catalogue's success was sensational, adding to the credibility of Sheldon's "science of cent values." Its idiosyncratic style of cataloguing by John J. Ford, Jr. was aimed at mail bidders, to protect against claims of collectors' switching or dealers' over-grading. Possibly because several coin auction houses recognized that this approach made a positive difference in the prices realized, their cataloguers thereafter imitated this style. Using a somewhat similar approach, but his own very different phraseology, Dr. Sheldon himself catalogued a cent collection (Anderson-Dupont, Part I, Stack's, September 24-25, 1954.) partly to show how it can and should be done, in his opinion. This second major test of the cent market proved to be the beginning of the end for Sheldon's original book values. More recently, however, some cent auctions have devoted their extra verbiage to puffery rather than to scientific description, so that in some instances today (as before the 1952 ANA), mail bidders are again at a disadvantage compared to those lucky enough to have seen the coins. Among the exceptions is, of course, Superior's first catalogue of the Robinson S. Brown, Jr. Collection, with descriptions by Jack Collins and grading by Del Bland.(Superior Galleries, September 3D-October 1, 1986. Superior Galleries has handled several extensive collections of large cents since this, all listed in Appendix A.)