Just finished comparing the listings of Liberty Cap, Head Facing Right in Manley's book against those in Fuhrman's Volume 1 handbook. Half Cent Die States by Ronald Manley was copywritten in 1998. The Half Cent Handbook by Ed Fuhrman was copywritten in 2022. The Fuhrman book has quite a few more varieties list than Manley does. I'm going to lean on Fuhrman's book because the 20+ year difference could be largely responsible for the greater number of listings. My thinking is that more varieties may have appeared during that time period. Many of the "new" varieties in Fuhrman's book are listed as being R-8 which supports the idea of them having been found more recently. But the difference in numbers plays hell with the Cohen variety designators. I'll have to leave the resolution of that to the EAC people.
As far as I know there has only been one new Cohen subvariety show up since Cohens book was published (I don't have either Manley or Fuhrmans books so I'm not sure what the "extra" varieties would be unless Fuhrman included the different planchet stock varieties that were listed in Breen (rolled stock, token stock, and spoiled cent stock. Many of the caps come on more than one stock type, some on all three.)
Die states are not die varieties. Different planchet stocks could be viewed as varieties of a sort, but if I were still active in half cent die variety collecting, I would have a representative coin, not each variety on each planchet source type. This sort of study is interesting in the academic sense, but it really kills the hobby for a lot of would be collectors. When one collector has to have multiple examples of each variety, there are less coins available for others. Even the most common varieties are represented by maybe 4,000 to 5,000 coins (e.g. 1804 C-13, Plain 4 Stemless reverse). For most varieties which are rated R-1, the number of survivors is in the 100s. For the better stuff, R-4 and better, there might be a couple hundred. It does not take many coins in one collection to make the hobby "exclusive."
