I have only been studying Barber coins for a few months now but I think there are a couple questions i can't quite find the answer for. @KBBPLL . Posted all that information on some subtle design changes to the barber design that occurred at the turn of the 20th Century. I found the 1999 articles relating to it but they don't discuss this either. You can pretty much draw a line between the Barbers from before 1900 and after 1900. Much like the late set Walker Halves, the 1900 to 1916 Dimes at least could be turned into a short set. It can't just be about mintages. Other articles support the idea the barber dimes stayed in circulation decades after being minted . This of couse means the earlier the coin was minted the quicker it wore down ; thus the earlier the year the smaller the surviving population of collectible coins. However, the difference between the surviving pops for those two decades must have had something to do with the design change. Perhaps i missed it. None of my grading guides make mention, but should you use a different standard for grading pre 1900 and post 1900 Barbers? My newest Grading book, Grading Coins From Photographs by Bowers make mention of the fact that Barber dimes after 1905 are far more common but that is about it. James
I had fun collecting Barber dimes years ago. They were easy to find and didn't cost very much. That may have changed. Still have a couple of albums somewhere. My only reference was the old Breen encyclopedia. Probably not much use anymore.
Do you mean the 2004 articles by Steve Hustad? I didn't see anything relevant in 1999. https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/515311 starting on page 8. As I may have noted in the other thread, the information in his article is outdated. His list of hub combinations is incomplete and we now know that there was a third intermediary reverse type introduced in 1900 (along with an 1899 (P) anomaly) and a 1901-O obverse die that used the previous type. Hustad does note "slightly lower relief" for the original reverse hub and "relief is a bit higher and fine inner leaf detail is more deeply engraved" for his 1901-1916 reverse hub, which would presumably also apply to the 1900-1901 reverse since only the "thick ribbon" was added in 1901. It's curious that he noted the engraving depth but not that the leaf veins completely changed. Bowers' Barber Silver Coins says regarding the 1901 changes to the obverse hub "This alteration seems to have lowered the relief slightly, almost imperceptibly, with the result that dimes with this obverse did not have the work LIBERTY wear away as quickly...". He doesn't come out and say it, but the implication is that we should take this into consideration when grading. It seems odd that Hustad says the relief was lower on the original reverse hub, and Bowers says the relief was lower on the new obverse hub (but says nothing about the reverse). I suppose both could be true, but why? Barber was clearly up to something in 1900-1901, as the hubs changed for all of his denominations - nickels, dimes, quarters and halves. Die life and coin wear seem likely reasons, but there's no documentation that I'm aware of. Perhaps after 8-9 years the master hubs/dies were showing signs of deterioration, or he just wanted to mess around for the new century. Since the traditional grading standard for F-12 and F-15 is a full Liberty, perhaps this is the area where we might see differences between the old hub and the new one, i.e. a 1892-1900 dime gets a Fine grade when Liberty letters are incomplete whereas a 1901-1916 drops to VG. I've not tried to observe something like this though, and I doubt most graders are even aware of the hub difference. I haven't paid any attention to surviving pops so I can't comment on that. Mintages generally ramped up because of the booming economy (except for 1901-1904 SF coins), and all Barbers were workhorses in daily commerce (as opposed to the dollar coins, which mostly sat in bank vaults). Bowers has paragraphs for each year and mint regarding availability of mint state and circulated grades, as well as a wealth of other information, so I recommend that you obtain a copy of it.
