Welcome to Part 2!
Nickels are cool and all (see: Part 1), but there’s just something very fun about looking through those little one cent pennies. Tons of errors to look for, and over one hundred years of Abraham Lincoln’s face. The small size and accessibility of pennies make them easy to handle and search through, and recycling them for more pennies is extremely cheap and efficient. One hundred pennies for only one dollar? Amazing.
Pennies are the ultimate starter coin for any new collector, and I’m still working on finishing my first album (I’m not ruling out a second). Today I did three rolls, and was able to score thirteen upgrades. The numbers are slightly skewed due to one completely unrecognizable penny, so we’ll start there.
This thing is a zombie. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more destroyed penny so far:
I can’t even begin to imagine what happened to this penny. I washed my hands after handling this one, just to be on the safe side. I tried, but I couldn’t decide on the date (it was not a wheat), or the mint mark, so I didn’t log either, but I did flag it under the Recycle tab in the spreadsheet. So, my years and mint marks categories are short one, but the final total in the end was still one hundred and fifty.
The first roll did give me a solid 1926. I already had two, but I ended up booking the new one, and moving one of the old ones to a tube. This was the oldest coin I came across today. The rest were just pretty.
After those, the first roll gave me some fairly pretty pennies from the 1970s and 1980s. These were better than the ones I had, so they ended up making their way into the book, and the old ones got moved to the recycling pile.
The second roll also gave me two upgrades from the 1970s and 1980s:
There isn’t anything terribly special here. Just a couple of pennies that are in pretty solid shape for their age. The third roll gave me two upgrades as well; another one from the 1980s that has some really beautiful coloring, and an absolutely stunning penny from 1995:
There’s something about that coloring on the 1987-D that really caught my eye. The detail in the strike is also pretty solid, so it earned a place in the album. That 1995 isn’t quite uncirculated, but it’s pretty close to me!
The charts for this hunt were:
To close this out, I wanted to quickly talk about my absolute favorite year for pennies. If you’ve done any penny hunting, you’ve definitely come across some pennies from 1968, and wondered “is this an error?” The 1968 penny is pretty consistently a mess, from the goofy font on the date, to the lettering always riding the rim at the top and on the sides, to frequent heavy finning, to the extremely hard strikes:
The minute I come across a 1968 penny that looks semi-normal, I might just consider myself a millionaire. Not actually, but a nice looking 1968 penny is certainly a rarity.
The messy appearance of 1968 pennies is primarily attributed to the prolonged use of the same dies by the mint, which resulted from coin shortages during that period. This led to inconsistencies in the striking process, causing the penny to exhibit various irregularities as the norm.
It is an interesting phenomenon that reflects the historical turbulence experienced in the United States during that year, and all of that uniqueness makes it my favorite penny to come across while hunting.
Do any of y’all have a favorite penny year? Let me know in the comments!
Note: I might be dedicating the rest of the weekend to watching Week 18 of the NFL, so the next coin post is TBD.
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