Please Grade This 1857-S Quarter

I normally don't attach much importance to provenance. It just doesn't matter to me much who owned before me any given coin.

However, This one may be an exception as it was part of the Norweb Collection sold by Bowers and Merena in the fall of 1988. A legendary collection by any accounts.

They had two 1857-S quarters. One example in MS something, and this one. The MS something got all the attention, while this example not much at all. All the best for me as that allowed me to get it cheap.

How would you grade it?

 

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Xf45. The reverse being in better condition. Some wear on high points on the Obverse. Could be AU50 if I graded it.

 

XF40, details - cleaned. Nice coin, thanks for sharing. BTW, who does your photography? Very nice!

 

Tough call, XF-45 or AU-50.

 

XF possibly AU

 

AU53

 

Thank you. I am glad to hear my pics seem to be OK.

I do them myself using a simple old Canon SX200 camera (about $220). No fancy set-up, just a window sill, some daylight, a wooden dowel to lift up the lower bottom of the coin to avoid dark spots. Also, you need a steady hand!

 

40

 

Great coin! I'd like to know more about how you eliminate dark spots. You said dowel, do you mean a very thin shim?

 

It was very hard to post a guess; kept drooling on the key board. I guess XF-45 based on the amount of wear. The fields are so smooth they almost appear smoothed, but a class group like Bowers and Merena would have noted it as such. (I think). James

 

I’d be in the 40 camp, 45 on a good day.

 

Hi, this is what I mean: just bits of wood, cylindrical or square of various diameters chosen depending on the size of the coin and the angle you wish to attain. Very useful to be able to capture a more or less even amount on the light over the whole surface of the coin.

When taking pictures, if you want head-on pictures one needs to ensure your camera angle is perpendicular to the surface of the coin. Very simple, really.

 

Ah. I see now. Thanks!

 

XF45 to AU50. I like it. I like it with a black background even better.

 

I'll go with XF45. Choice example.

 

45

 

Now how did you do that. It looks much better. Thank you!

I used a software called Netscape (or something like that), but got rid of it because it was too cumbersome to use. Had to be done all manually.

 

I have been using photoScape for the last 10 or so years - freeware. And I do nothing fancy with it. Now it only takes me a few minutes to crop the obverse of a coin, save it, crop the reverse and save it. I have it set so when it crops it changes the background around the coin to black. Then I used the combine tab, drop both pictures in, pick the side-by-side view and save.

This is a recent addition to the type set. Basically all I did was take dealer pictures and crop to the black background. In this case I thing I used the dealer pictures and not the cac pictures. You can look it up on cac - not sure if this link will work.

https://www.cacgrading.com/cert/740609875

 

That is a nice and quite scarce early quarter.

Thank you for the tip about the PhotoScape software. I will give it a try.

 

I also use PhotoScape. Great FREE download. Been using it for years.