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Message:: [QUOTE="-jeffB, post: 2972637, member: 27832"]Good, instructive examples, but it's a bit more complicated than that. The 1916-D dime is plentiful in low grades (you can find multiple examples at any tiny show, and most dealers have at least a couple); it's just expensive. That's because Mercury dimes are a popular series to collect, and have been for decades, so demand is high. I'd guess that it's popular because everybody has always handled dimes in change, and most dates in the series are cheap to obtain in fairly nice condition, so it's easy to get started. Lincoln cents are an even more extreme example. Nearly every kid used to get started with Lincoln cents, and most could be found for one cent apiece. That meant many thousands, perhaps millions of collectors just needed those "few key dates" to complete their collections -- and the S VDB is the king of the Lincoln key dates. But they are common, in the same sense as the 1916-D dime, only more so. They're everywhere; they're just really expensive, because demand is high. The 1928 Peace dollar is a sort of counterexample. It's scarce, but there just aren't as many Peace collectors. Its mintage was lower than the S VDB, and its surviving population is much smaller by all estimates -- but the 1928 dollar is cheaper than the S VDB in every grade below Gem, and its value has dropped significantly over the last five or ten years, especially in lower grades. At another extreme, look at the First Spouse gold series. The highest mintage in the series was 10,000 coins, many of them had mintages below 4,000 -- and no one cares. They're all in high mint or proof state, they're extremely rare, and they trade close to melt value.[/QUOTE]

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