Numismatic Die Study

Die study, the comparison of surviving coins to determine which were made from the same dies, is one of the basic tools of modern numismatics, especially for determining the chronology, mints, and quantities of production for the coinages of ancient and medieval issues. Its first documented use, however, was in the study of American half cents and cents of the 1790s carried out by Sylvester Sage Crosby in 1869 and published in 1897. Since then, many of those issues have been analyzed to the extent that numismatists can determine at what stage of a die’s lifetime a given specimen was produced.

Gift of Thomas L. Gaskill, Class of 1896.

Sylvester Sage Crosby (d. 1914). The United States Coinage of 1793, Cents and Half Cents.

Sylvester Sage Crosby (d. 1914). The United States Coinage of 1793, Cents and Half Cents. Boston: S. Crosby, 1897. The copper issues of 1793 were the first coins struck in the United States Mint building in Philadelphia and are widely collected by die variety. The die study carried out on this series by Crosby in 1869 is the first known research to identify the distinct obverse and reverse dies used for an issue and to demonstrate how they were linked on various specimens.

Edward Maris. A Historic Sketch of the Coins of New Jersey.

Edward Maris. A Historic Sketch of the Coins of New Jersey. Philadelphia: W. K. Bellows, 1881. The coinage produced in the Confederation period by private minters under contract to the State of New Jersey, and by others clandestinely, was extremely complicated in its die use. The identifications of die sharing made by Maris 130 years ago are still the basis of classification of the series.