Collecting Sets Within a Set
WHAT’S THE MOST popularly collected U.S. coin today? I’m tempted to say the Lincoln cent, because that’s the coin I started with “back in the day.” After all, it was inexpensive to collect from circulation, challenging to find the early ones (pre-1930), and cents to look through were literally available by the ton.
However, a sociology professor once told me something in class that has stuck with me to this day, more than 57 years later: “Don’t generalize from personal experience.” And so, even though I may be partial to Lincoln cents, that doesn’t mean that most other collectors are as well.
In fact, the most popularly collected U.S. coin is probably the Morgan dollar. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s what Adam Crum, in his Foreword to the sixth edition of David Bowers’ A Guide Book of Morgan Silver Dollars, wrote: “Today the Morgan silver dollar is likely the most widely collected coin in all numismatics.”
One stimulus for this popularity was the release of millions of stored dollar coins by the Treasury Department in the early 1960s. Coins that had been rare and seemingly impossible to find or afford became common and inexpensive. Even more of this release came in the famous GSA
