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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;KBBPLL, post: 26538283, member: 104064&quot;]Do you mean the 2004 articles by Steve Hustad? I didn&#039;t see anything relevant in 1999. </p><p><a href="https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/515311" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/515311" rel="nofollow">https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/book/515311</a> 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 As I may have noted in the other thread, the information in his article is outdated.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. </p><p><br /></p><p>Hustad does note &quot;slightly lower relief&quot; for the original reverse hub and &quot;relief is a bit higher and fine inner leaf detail is more deeply engraved&quot; for his 1901-1916 reverse hub, which would presumably also apply to the 1900-1901 reverse since only the &quot;thick ribbon&quot; was added in 1901. It&#039;s curious that he noted the engraving depth but not that the leaf veins completely changed. </p><p><br /></p><p>Bowers&#039; Barber Silver Coins says regarding the 1901 changes to the obverse hub &quot;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...&quot;. He doesn&#039;t come out and say it, but the implication is that we should take this into consideration when grading. </p><p><br /></p><p>It seems odd that Hustad says the relief was <i>lower </i>on the original <i>reverse </i>hub, and Bowers says the relief was lower on the new <i>obverse </i>hub (but says nothing about the reverse). I suppose both could be true, but why? </p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;s no documentation that I&#039;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. </p><p><br /></p><p>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&#039;ve not tried to observe something like this though, and I doubt most graders are even aware of the hub difference. </p><p><br /></p><p>I haven&#039;t paid any attention to surviving pops so I can&#039;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.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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