It's "Dime Time Tuesday!". Post your dimes also.....

Here's my contribution: This 1853 No Arrows dime is the plate coin from Kamal Ahwash's seminal book on Liberty Seated dimes. Indeed, that is why I bought this particular coin.

On February 21, 1853, new law reduced the weight (and thus the silver content) of the half dimes, dimes, quarters and half dollars. The new coins had arrows next to the date to separate the new coins from the earlier ones so they wouldn't be melted. This was required because the silver value of the older coinage had exceeded the coins' face value and was being hoarded and melted.

These coins were struck before the effective date of 2/21/53. Mintage was 93,000 and conventional wisdom has held that many were melted. But, Bowers notes that the 1853 No Arrows dime is very scarce in circulated condition but much more available, relatively speaking, in high MS grades suggesting that this coin was hoarded when issued. Ahwash called the issue a high R-6 but it's probably more like a R-4.

 

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Owning a plate coin would be special @Publius2 . The closest I come is this 1903-S dime from the McCloskey collection. He wrote about his discovery of a second Barber dime reverse type in a 1980 Coin World article (there are now three), and mentions owning a "Type A reverse on the 1903-S." He did not have a huge collection of Barber dimes so I believe this is the exact coin mentioned in the discovery article. His last line (below) turned out to be correct - his types A and B are both indeed found on SF dimes for 1901 through 1905.

 

Cool to have coins with a provenance. I have about half a dozen of the McCloskey half dimes from the auction back in Feb, 2022.

 

Same auction where I got mine. The 1901-S mentioned in the article (I think) was also sold but one coin was enough for my budget.