Since the US Government apparently saves every document ever handled, there is a great archive of coin/treasury/mint related stuff. I'm finding the correspondence between citizen and Mint to be most interesting (for now). It seems like proof sets were ordered in this manner of the attached PDF. It is the hand-written letter to the Mint Director asking for proof sets from 1889 along with a handy OCR text because I can't read their quill and potted ink writing. To save you the trouble, the body of the letter is: Minor coins are ones without silver or gold I believe. In 1889, there was: Indian Cent Three-cent Nickel Liberty Nickel That's $0.09 and the buyer is asking for 5 sets for $0.60 ($0.12/set), a 3-cent premium? He could have asked for 6 sets. Am I missing something? If you are interested in these kinds of historical documents, go to: https://archive.org/details/ordersfiveminorcoinproofsets18890715/mode/2up and scroll to the bottom. You may find yourself in a rabbit-hole
Yes, the very early, prior to 1936, Proof sets were usually sold in groups. The minor coins, cent through nickel, were one group. If two and nickel three cents were made, they were included. The silver, three cents (if made) through silver dollar were another group. Then came the gold. The gold sets sold for about $43 with a face value of $37.50 if the usual four coins were involved. That was a lot of money in those days, and very few gold sets were sold each year. Twenty to twenty-five was the norm. One area the mint did break its sets only rule was with the gold dollars of the 1880s. Another was the 1875 Twenty Cent Piece.
I wonder how much postage was for that. And does anyone have a photo of what the "minor coin proof set" would look like? Did it come in some sort of box or display?
Has the mint ever sold proof coins without a premium, other than when it dumped unsold ones into circulation? The production and handling of proof coins requires extra labor; it only makes sense that there's a charge for that.
I am quite sure that the pre-1936 Proof coins were only wrapped in tissue paper. When left in that paper for long term storage, the silver coins frequently acquired the blue toning frequency seen on those coins. In 1936 the coins were slipped into celluloid sleeves which were stapled together if it was a set. Starting in 1950, the mint sold complete Proof sets only. The coins were in celluloid sleeves stapled together. The celluloid was changed to plastic in mid 1954, which was not a good thing. It made many coins go bad. The flat packs started in mid 1955. Hard plastic stated with the 1966 Special Mint Sets.
The Newman Numismatic Portal is a treasure trove of this kind of stuff. I recall a letter where they were paying for a proof set with stamps. Don't quote me on that, but it stuck in my mind. Somewhere around 1900.
I think a postal note was like a money order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_postal_notes. I see there were also postal note stamps, used for small amounts of money, but were only issued 1945-1951. I may be confused about what the letter I referred to meant.
As John mentioned above in post #7 the individual coins were simply wrapped in tissue paper, placed in a small box and sent to the buyer. While I don't have any pics of originals from that time period the paper and boxes looked similar to these from the late '30s and early '40s, which John also mentioned - But they did not use cellophane sleeves like you see there. It was also fairly common in the 1800's for Proof Sets, owned by collectors of the time, to be sold at auction much like they are today. Only on rare occasions, and typically for Presentation sets like this one for the King of Siam - Other than that is was plain boxes and tissue paper. A hundred years later things like this were more common -
It is, was, and always has been mandated by law that they could only be sold at a profit. And the same laws also mandated that those not sold for profit had to be melted down, they were not dumped into circulation by the mint. The only way that Proof coins ended up in circulation was when those owned by collectors were put in circulation.
I was misremembering this quote from the PCGS page on proof 1878 Trade dollars: This still seems to indicate that some were not melted or "sold for profit" (at least, not official profit, wink wink)...?
Another bit of trivia - from the monthly coinage records you can decipher that at least in the years 1896-1906, they minted proof sets quarterly in March, June, September, and December. The Philadelphia "number of pieces" in other months almost always ends in 000 (for non-gold), so the proof numbers show up as the non-000 number. In the example below, they coined 100 proofs of the "subsidiary" coins (halves, quarters, dimes) and 300 of the nickels and cents in September 1900. The numbers were high in March (collectors wanting the new year right away), low in June and September, then high again in December (procrastinators not wanting to miss out?). https://archive.org/details/Rg104entry271vol5/page/n69/mode/2up
But Breen claimed that sometimes, the mint would "slip" a Mint State coin into a Proof set if they are run out of the coins. We know that Breen had a habit of making up stories. Still I can't disprove that because I have seen darn few original sets from 1858 to 1916 era. I had a 1909 set at one time. The silver coins matched. The dealer who sold it to me at the 1976 ANA said that they had come to him in the tissue paper. I wish I could have gotten the tissue paper. On another issue, Rogen Burdette, in his book about the 1936 to 1942 sets, said that the mint melted a lot of sub-par Proof coins. They may have done the same in the early period.
While I cannot swear that it's the case, I suspect an exception was made with these because the coins had been demonetized as Bowers states in the next paragraph - "The official Mint issue price for Proof trade dollars from 1878 to 1883 was $1.025 each, according to one account, because the coin had been demonetized; most other sources give the figure as $1.25 each, a figure with which R.W. Julian agrees. (Earlier, when the coins were worth $1 face value each, 1873 Proofs were sold for $1.75 each in paper money or $1.50 each in silver.)"
