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Message:: [QUOTE="lordmarcovan, post: 2779179, member: 10461"]<img src="http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k173/lordmarcovan/Love%20Token%20Set/BannerwithBarbers.jpg" class="bbCodeImage wysiwygImage" alt="" unselectable="on" /> I've been a "holey" coin collector since the millennium. In the course of buying holed coins for my famous “Holey Coin Vest”, I came across some interesting love tokens. Love tokens are coins with hand-engraved artwork on them. Many of these were christening gifts for newborn babies, or gifts from one sweetheart to another, which is no doubt where the "love token" term originated. Women kept them on charm bracelets and men kept them on watch chains. The practice began many centuries ago, and continued into the 20th century, but love tokens' heyday seems to have come during the high point of the Victorian era, from the 1870s to the 1890s. Some of the engraving on these is stellar, and many of these little hand-engraved curiosities are real works of art. The same tradition has carried on with today's "hobo nickel" artists, though they use a variety of coins besides the Buffalo nickels popular as host coins with hobo artists during the Great Depression, and they have more sophisticated tools at their disposal. I had long been toying with the idea of attempting a date set of Seated Liberty dimes with love token reverses, and in January of 2008 I decided to take my few accumulated pieces and attempt such a set. The Seated Liberty dime, particularly its Legend Obverse subtype of 1860-1891, seems to be the most common host coin for love token engraving, with the gold dollar close behind. The wonderful thing about these is that one can collect them as coins AND as one-of-a-kind miniature masterpieces of a lost art. That makes them a great "two in one" collectible. And they pack a lot of bang for the budget, too, considering how relatively inexpensive most are. Another advantage to collecting Seated dimes this way is that since I was collecting coins that had their reverses (and therefore the mintmarks) removed, I didn't need to concern myself with finding rarer branch mint coins like some of the Carson City issues. Some of the years when dimes were produced in small quantities at Philadelphia only (especially 1844, 1846, 1879, 1880, and 1881) were challenging, however.  I found a couple of the 1870s key dates (even cherrypicked one for $7.50 in a bulk lot!) but not the 1840s ones. I sold this collection around 2013 and did pretty well on them.  Always knew I'd pick up and start another collection of them, and as of this writing in June of 2017 I am working on my third love token collection.  This was my first serious foray into them. Though I am a numismatic "jack of all trades", the <a href="http://lovetokensociety.com/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://lovetokensociety.com/" rel="nofollow">Love Token Society</a> is the one specialist organization I've seen fit to join.  There's some good information on their webpage. The images were mostly produced on a flatbed scanner, so they're not ideal. Mintage numbers cited below are the total output of ALL mints combined in each given year. On some coins with monograms, the order the initials is uncertain, so I just described the letters in alphabetical order.[/QUOTE]

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