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The Mint has posted 24 semi-finalist entries in its competition to find a common obverse design for the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coins.

See all 24 below.

The winning design will be revealed Sept. 10. It will be used on $5 gold pieces, silver dollars and clad half dollars. The common reverse is a baseball.

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How can I tell if my 1912-S Liberty Head nickel is genuine?

What is the reason the military has been using pogs at our bases in Afghanistan?
My sources tell me weight is the major reason. Troops need physical currency to use at military canteens and exchanges. The weight of bulk coinage would limit the amount of other strategic supplies that could be transported in the same shipment.

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Why did arrows at the dates return to silver coins in 1873 to 1874?
Silver weight increased. No one is certain why the arrows were the design applied, but the reason was to identify the coins as complying with metric weights and measures being used by most other countries worldwide. The arrows were dropped in 1875, though it isn’t clear if this was the order of the Mint Bureau director or the Philadelphia mint superintendent.

Why is it that there are more proofs than circulation strikes available of some of the low-mintage U.S. coins?
The chief reason is the lack of collector interest in the circulation pieces at the time. What few collectors there were (prior to 1900) kept the proofs, but the circulation strikes disappeared through normal attrition.

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In the header it said “Your Payment is Approved.”

Of course, it was spam.

It had also gotten through our company spam filter.

Naturally, I was curious as to what the latest online scam is.

It purported to be from our recently appointed Treasury secretary, though the name was written as Jacob Jack Lew rather than Jacob Joseph Lew, or the more informal Jack Lew.

The body of the email read something like an edict from an ancient or medieval king that mentions all of his titles.

He is secretary of the Treasury, confirmed by the Senate, was White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and deputy secretary of State for Management and Resources.

What could someone with so many important titles want with little old me?

“By virtue of my position as the 76th Secretary of the Treasury, I have irrevocably instructed the Federal Reserve Board to approve your fund release via issuance of a CERTIFIED CHECK drawn on the FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF NEW YORK, which is the authourized bank for your fund release.”

With so many grand titles employed, obviously this email could not simply offer me my annual income tax refund. It had to be something more.

It sure was.

“However, as a former White House Chief of Staff under the Obama Administration, I wish to state categorically that a CERTIFIED CHECK of $6,500,000.00 USD drawn on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will be issued and sent to you via the US Postal Service at no cost to you.”

But the no cost to me part was quickly followed by:

“The only cost associated with your fund release is the cost of processing a Fund Clearance Certificate.”

I am supposed to send $150 by Western Union to a person with a Chinese American name in San Francisco.

I don’t recall ever receiving a spam message from someone claiming to be from the Treasury before.

There are the standard spam messages that say my account at such and such a bank is frozen until I do what the email says, or that someone in Africa, who has a very large sum at a bank, wants me to help deposit it somewhere else to my great benefit.

I am sure you have received many of these as well.

What I am waiting for is something more plausible and dangerous as spam, like an offer of MS-65 Morgan dollars at half price. Collectors have been falling for that one or similar offers of discounts for the 50 years I have been collecting.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper “Numismatic News.”

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How’s your mental health?

Isn’t that an awfully personal question? Sure, it is, but I cannot help myself this week.

If you look below, you can take a numismatic version of a free-association test. It is not a Rorschach test. I am not a psychiatrist. But I do think that we collectors on average are probably mentally fitter than we would be if we were not collectors.

We certainly know how to escape from our problems from time to time for a little mental rest and recreation with our coins.

Thanks to the U.S. Mint posting the 24 semi-finalist designs for the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame commemorative coin, we can have a little more fun.

Who doesn’t like to be a coin design art critic? By looking at these designs, not only can you pick your favorite, you can test your thoughts about each one and write a comment about it online if you want to.

I enjoyed going through the designs. I think the Mint’s art competition to determine the common obverse design for a clad half dollar, silver dollar and $5 gold piece is a fantastic idea. Keep in mind that whatever the winning design happens to be, it needs to look good on the tiny $5 as well as on the large silver dollar.

As I happily went through the 24 designs one struck me as something that would look good being worn as a law enforcement badge. I think that it just looks so incredibly official.

Another design of a player sliding into home plate brought a little word play to my mind as I considered its merits. For some reason, I wanted to put “America Safe” with it. Crazy? Probably, but that is what popped into my mind.

I noticed that the Mint rotates the designs on the web page so they do not always appear in the same place That’s probably a good idea lest we fix it in our minds that the first design is somehow superior because it appears first.

I came a way from my review thinking that it is a shame that we cannot use three of the designs. Some designs I thought would look much better on a small coin. Others I thought would only work on a big coin.

The one-size-fits-all requirement will give the judges a bit of a headache. It makes me glad that my opinion has no impact on the eventual outcome.

After you have studied the designs and thought your thoughts, why not email me at david.harper@fwmedia.com and share them? I can put them in the Letters section for all readers to dissect.

Perhaps a consensus will form. Perhaps not. Let’s see what develops. The winning design will not be announced by the U.S. Mint until Sept. 10. That gives us all plenty of time to chew the topic over in a leisurely, summertime sort of way.

Whether you find a design to love, or one to hate, I think you will enjoy making your own determination, sharing it with readers and then sitting back to see what other readers are thinking.

The best part is participating in this process is far cheaper than seeing a shrink.

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The seminar is an opportunity to learn from the industry’s leading experts. John Highfill, author of the Comprehensive Silver Dollar Encyclopedia and founder of the National Silver Dollar Roundtable, will be speaking for the first time at this show with Logan McKechnie, publisher of the VAMView Retail Price Guide.

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Special guest speakers participating in this forum are experts and authors Jeff Oxman and Mark Witkower.

The first 60 seminar registrants will receive a numismatic publication, and a drawing will be held for the Comprehensive Silver Dollar Encyclopedia at the end of the event.
It will be held at 12:15 p.m. on Saturday. Seating is limited.

For more show details, visit www.ckshows.com, email info@ckshows.com, or call Dawn at (888) 330-5188, or (800) 208-1810.

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In every conversation or email communication I have, there seems to be a number of assumptions that I make.

Most of the time, these assumptions work pretty well and help both the telephone caller or email writer and me get to the meat of the matter.

Sometimes, though, my assumptions can be way off the mark.

I had a telephone call last week from a fellow who liked to examine his paper money. He had either our Standard Guide to Small-Size Paper Money or our Standard Catalog of U.S. Paper Money – possible both.

He simply said had run across something that was not in the book.

I get telephone calls from people who do not even know that guide books of various kinds exist. When I get a call from someone who refers to one or more of our books, my mind gears up to the next level.

In this case, the caller said he had a star note that was different.

The caller knew that star notes are notes that are created as replacements for regular notes that somehow got damaged or were defective in some other way.

The star appears at the end of the serial number instead of the suffix letter that is used on regular notes.

Now the note the caller had was different. I was told that not only did this Series 2009 $10 Federal Reserve Note have a suffix letter, but it also had a star. That is not supposed to happen.

My first thought was that someone was playing games with a photocopier. I told the caller that I assumed that it was an ordinary note, but what he said puzzled me enough that I transferred him to George Cuhaj, who creates and edits our paper money books.

George had the presence of mind to ask the caller to email him an image. Several days later the image arrived.

I was a little bit surprised. What was on the note was simply a dark smudge of some kind. It did not look like a star. It did not look like anything. It did not even look like it belonged with the serial number.

I could never say something to a caller like, “Are you sure it’s a star?” But I guess I will never assume that when someone tells me that they see something that it is in fact what it is.

This was also proof that smart phones are wonderfully useful tools.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper “Numismatic News.”

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This is a reprint of Mr. Merrill’s “Auction Perspectives” column that appeared in the Feb. 8, 2000, issue.

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I can’t begin to tell you how many times it happens. Once a week, a day, an hour? What I’m writing about are the collections that are sold for a fraction of their value. No matter what anyone says, there is absolutely no substitute for knowledge in numismatics.

Consider for a moment an experience I had only last fall. Collector R was like so many numismatists. He enjoyed and studied his hobby, but his family had absolutely no involvement with his collection.

Over the years, R had consigned to us three or four times. I had met his wife and upon more than one occasion R had mentioned in my presence that if anything ever happened to him for her to call me. Since all of us, even someone at such an advanced state of preservation as myself, think we’ll live forever, I was surprised when a telephone call last fall resulted in Mrs. R informing me that R had died of a heart attack the prior month.

Now, I’m not going to be so coarse as to say something like, “Sorry to hear that; got any coins to sell?” Instead, what I did do was express my condolences and leave it at that. What else can one say at a time like that? There is absolutely nothing that I could do that would make Mrs. R feel better.

Some 30 days went by and I received another call from Mrs. R. She inquired about the auction process and indicated that at some point she might like to sell the collection and that neither she nor her son had any interest in the coins.

We talked for a while and – this is important – she specifically told me that she was in no hurry to sell because there were so many things that had to be settled. She asked if I would call her in about three weeks. Twenty days later, we were on the phone again. After the initial howdys, a story that I’ve heard all too often started to unfold.

Son Dufus (not his real name; just an appropriate adjective) needed money to restore his 1960s muscle cars. What do you think happened? (a) he consigned to one of our competitors; (b) he decided to pay 18 percent interest and charge it on his handy plastic; (c) he robbed George W’s presidential campaign war chest, or (d) he sold the collection outright for all of $15,000 in green money.

Choice “d” is the correct response, as in it’s a done deal. OK, add these values as we go along – a full set of all the Barber coins (except the ’94-S dime) in VF to UNC; a like set of Walkers; a pair of 12-piece gold type sets, a complete set of $2.50 Indians …

Shall I continue? Well, let’s see. There was also a partial Morgan set with about 85 pieces, some proof type coins and a few silver commemoratives. If you haven’t passed $15,000 by now, please return to Mrs. Brooks fourth grade arithmetic class and place the dunce cap on your noggin, because all of this happened in 1999, not 1949.
Shocked, dismayed, angry, you name it; I was. After my initial reaction subsided, a vengeful thought came to me momentarily – to tell Mrs. R what her impulsive son had done. But you know what? All I would do is make her sad and add to her tragedy. Rather than make me feel good by making her feel bad, I just mumbled something really intelligent like, “Oh, um, OK.”

Since the collection was now gone for pennies on the dollar, I asked to speak to son Dufus whose language and attitude did not disappoint my expectations. Dufus managed to get the collection as far as the closest listing in the yellow pages, which was the equivalent of the Ajax Pawn and Fish Emporium.

Oh, the temptation to chastise Dufus was great, but this was the end of the ’90s and I needed to get in touch with my sensitivity and feminine side before the decade terminated. And so, with a false smile in my voice, I listened to Dufus tell me where R’s collection had gone.

Muscle Head now had $15,000 to work on his muscle cars and I was about to call the new owner of the collection. Three minutes later I was in contact with Ajax & Co. I explained my interest and was interrupted by a cackling laugh. Ajax then proceeded to tell me how he had “stolen” the collection, had disbursed it in a week and had made himself $50,000.

I thought I was talking to one of those puffed-up male turkeys who was strutting around the yard. R’s collection was gone at a fraction of its value, Mrs. R and Muscle Head would never know, for they, like you, can sell their collection only once.

Someone once told me to never forget what is worth remembering, or remember what is best forgotten. I think there just might be an application of that in this month’s column.

This “Viewpoint” originally was written in the year 2000 by Bob Merrill of Heritage Auctions in his “Auction Perspectives column.”

Viewpoint is a forum for the expression of opinion on a variety of numismatic subjects. To have your opinion considered for Viewpoint, write to David C. Harper, Editor, Numismatic News, 700 E. State St., Iola, WI 54990. Send email to david.harper@fwmedia.com.

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The mint in Carson City opened in 1870. There was a world of promise at the time that it would turn out large numbers of coins. This was especially the case when you consider that the famous Comstock Lode was just 20 miles away.

However, the CC Mint had political problems from the start, so some mine owners refused to send their silver to Carson City, shipping it instead to San Francisco. This meant lower mintages than had been expected at Carson City. By 1892 the Comstock Lode was on its way out in terms of importance as Colorado by then was a bigger silver producer. Moreover, silver dollars, the stock in trade of Carson City, were not really needed any longer. Over 357 million were in Treasury vaults, another 7.5 million were on hand in national banks and fewer than 50 million were actually circulating.

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Under the circumstances, a large 1892-CC mintage would have been a surprise. As it turned out, the 1892-CC was not as low a mintage at 1,352,000 as might have been expected. But the coin was somewhat unusual by how it was released into circulation.

The coins were not needed. In all probability, nearly the entire mintage simply sat in a vault at the mint. Around 1900, however, they were shipped either to San Francisco or Washington, D.C., to sit in other vaults along with all other coins on hand at the former mint.

The 1892-CC could have joined many other CC dollars in Washington, but did not do so. Many apparently went to San Francisco where they could have been melted under the terms of the 1918 Pittman Act, or paid out to the gaming tables of Nevada.

There are assorted reports of sightings of the 1892-CC starting in the 1920s and continuing to the 1950s. However rarely in Mint State, If there were any bags from the San Francisco vault that survived in Mint State they would have been about 1,700 Mint State specimens found in the Redfield Hoard.

The coins shipped to Washington managed not be end up in General Services Administration sales unlike the CC dates of the early 1880s. The likely time when the 1892-CC Morgans would have emerged from the Treasury was the 1950s as there were reports that included an estimate of 50 bags in 1955.

With no GSA coins and 1,700 Redfield coins in Mint State, it is just a matter of what collectors and dealers might have saved on their own.

As a result, the 1892-CC lists for $190 in VG-8, $1,375 in MS-60 and $8,900 in MS-65.

Realistically, the 1892-CC can be found in grades like MS-63 and they are usually well struck and attractive. There can be problems with bagmarks, but normally nice examples can be found. A nice example is well worth the price as the 1892-CC is a very interesting date and one with a history that suggests it is not as available as it might have been.

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David Hendin, American Numismatic Society adjunct curator, was the recipient of the 2013 Gunnar Holst Numismatic Foundation Medal.

Hendin received the award at a lecture at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, May 16 by Bengt Holmen and Yngve Karlsson of the foundation. The topic of Hendin’s lecture was “The Coinage of the Two Jewish Wars.”

The Gunnar Holst Foundation cited Hendin:

… for many years of comprehensive contributions to numismatics. By virtue of his education as a journalist, Hendin quickly recognized the function of coins as an early means of mass media. His research in numismatics has resulted in hundreds of articles, his lectures and seminars in many countries have been comprehensive. Hendin’s foremost merit is his Guide to Biblical Coins, now [in] its fifth edition. His descriptions of the historical backgrounds to the coins are exemplary. Hendin has been awarded many literary prizes. His 1973 book Death as a Fact of Life was a bestseller; this is evidence of the scope of his personal qualities.
Hendin was the 22nd scholar to receive the medal since it was created in 1992.

The Gunnar Holst Numismatic Foundation of Göteborg was founded and initially funded in Holst’s honor by Rut and Bengt Holmén. Holst, who died several years ago at age 97, was a lifelong active member of the Göteborg Numismatic Society.

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I will make money on some of my coin purchases.

I will lose money on some of my coin purchases.

There is no secret formula to achieve a 100 percent success rate, or even anything close to it.

This being true, it scarces me when we receive calls here from people who have suddenly decided that some aspect of numismatics is the royal road to riches.

Colleague Lisa  Bellavin took a phone call yesterday from a fellow who was excited about gold coins. He was a newcomer to the field, he said.

He wasn’t the usual excited new gold bullion buyer because he admitted that bullion prices can go up and down.

On the other hand, he said that gold collector coins always go up.

I heard Lisa explaining that markets can run hot and cold. Collector coins, gold or any other kind, don’t always go up in value.

I don’t know if the caller got the message that he should re-evaluate his expectations.

I have been a collector for 50 years. Fortunately for me, whenever I got wound up about some can’t miss opportunity, other factors of life helped me limit the financial damage.

A long time horizon helps. The 21st century surge in the prices of gold and silver bailed me out of a few stupid purchases from years ago.

I don’t recall ever consciously deciding that I was a collector for life. It just was.

I expect if you could ask my younger self about it during my first few years in the hobby, I probably would have replied something like, “Why wouldn’t I collect for life?”

It simply never occurred to me that I might stop.

Time has been a great ally, though I probably would not have realized that this is the case in those early years, either.

I liked buying the hot items of the day just as much as anyone.

My fingers got burned. I was disappointed.

I survived.

Unfortunately, the time horizon of the caller is likely to be too short. His sense of urgency is his greatest enemy.

Gold collector coins might have a wonderful payback in 10, 20, or even 50 years, but the caller is probably thinking 10, 20 or 50 weeks.

Anything, including losses, can happen in such a short period of time.

Will he stick around if he burns his fingers on his can’t miss gold collector coins?

I hope so, but I don’t really believe it.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper is editor of the weekly newspaper “Numismatic News.”

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