My Favorite Coins: 1916-D Mercury Dime

My favorite coin in this column is a G-4 1916-D Mercury dime. It’s a coin I failed to find after many hours spent searching dime rolls. If I had found one during my roll- searching, however, it probably would have been in the same condition as the coin pictured here. Note: The line on Liberty’s cheek is not nearly as apparent on the actual coin as it is in my photo. As you are undoubtedly aware, the 1916-D dime is the big key to the Mercury dime series. Its mintage of just 264,000 pieces is the lowest mintage in the series that ran from 1916 through 1945. In fact, there are no other Mercury dimes with mintages below a million. As designed by Adolph A. Weinman, the obverse depicts the head of Liberty wearing a winged cap. The wings are supposed to imply Liberty of Thought. To the Treasury Department, the coin was known as the Winged Liberty Head dime. So how did it come to be known popularly as the Mercury dime? Well, depictions of the Roman god Mercury (the Greek god Hermes) show a young man wearing a winged cap. He also has wings on his heels. Obviously, he was supposed to be fleet afoot, which he would have to be as the messenger of the gods. Mercury was also the most clever Olympian god, ruling over good fortune, wealth, commerce, fertility and, perhaps paradoxically, thievery. Of course, pickpockets earn their keep, such as it is, by swiftly relieving their victims of their wallets/purses. According to one online source, the planet Mercury was named after the messenger god because of the speed with which it circles the sun. Mercury was also the god of travelers.

On the reverse, the central element is a fasces, defined as “... a bundle of rods with a projecting axe blade, carried by a lictor [Roman civil servant] in ancient Rome as a symbol of a magistrate’s power, and used as an emblem of authority in Fascist Italy.” The fasces is surrounded by an olive branch, symbolizing peace. In addition to the first-year key date, there are a couple of dates that could be considered semi-keys, the 1921(P) and the 1921-D, both with mintages of a little more than a million. In terms of mintage (1.08 million), the 1921-D should be the scarcer of the two, but I remember its being somewhat easier to find than the 1921-P (1.23 million). That probably had to do with the part of the country where I lived.

Another thing that I remember about the pair is that the 1921(P)s that I found often had weakness in the rim and last digit of the date. The only reference to this characteristic I found in print was a comment David Lange made about the 1921-D in his Complete Guide to Mercury Dimes.

He wrote, “Peripheral weakness is a chronic problem with this date, although not to the degree seen with some 1921(P) dimes.”

I now own one of each of these semikey dates, the 1921(P) in NGC VF-20 and the 1921-D in PCGS F-15. Both coins have Green Bean stickers from Certified Acceptance Corporation (CAC), which attests to the coins’ grades being in the top tiers of similar dimes with the same grades.

I paid $254 for the 1921(P) in 2008 and $235 for the 1921-D in 2009. Both came from Heritage auctions. The current wholesale value (Coin Dealer Newsletter, CDN) for the 1921(P) in VF-20 is $240 for the coin with a Green Bean, whereas the NGC value is $380. The 1921-D has a CDN value of $210 with CAC approval, and its PCGS price guide value is $310.

At the time I did my roll- searching in the late ’50s, early ’60s, the Guide Book of United States Coins (Red Book) value of the 1916-D was $35 in Good, with a Fine coin worth $100. The 2024 Red Book tells me that it’s now worth $1,200 in G-4 and

$3,000 in F-12. The current CDN value is $1,000, which is probably what I could get for mine.

To give you an idea of how much a G-4 1916-D has appreciated this century, I bought it for $441 in December 2000 from a dealer who had purchased the accumulation of one of my former colleagues. The colleague had other coins I had sold him that I didn’t buy back. One in particular that I remember was an 1866 Seated Liberty quarter, with a current value of $1,250 in F-12. I had purchased it for less than $20 from an Oregon dealer and then sold it to my colleague for about $25, which I thought was a good transaction until I looked at the date’s mintage (16,800). The reason I passed on buying it a second time was that I didn’t like its cleaned appearance.

Some of the other interesting dates that I occasionally found were the 1926- S (1.52 million) and the 1931-D (1.26 million). I currently own an NGC- graded 1931-D in MS-66 with Full Bands (FB) and a Green Bean. The FB designation is awarded to dimes with complete separation of the central bands surrounding the fasces on the reverse.

I bought the coin in a Heritage auction in 2003 for $322. The current CDN value with CAC is $780, and the NGC price guide indicates it’s worth $850. As a junior collector, I managed to trade for several 1931-Ds in either Mint State or About Uncirculated condition. Unfortunately, this was a case of easy-come, easy- go, and I frittered them all away in unwise trades.

Two other low-mintage Mercuries that I like but don’t currently own are the 1930- S ( 1.84 million) and the 1931- S (1.80 million). During the decade (19851995) when I had a part- time mail-order business, the 1931- S was my favorite loss leader. I offered it in small classified ads at a bargain price to gain new names for my mailing list.

My stock of the dimes in VG-F condition came from the Oregon dealer I mentioned earlier. He offered them by the roll for $1.25 per coin, and I sold them post-paid for a little more than I had paid for them. Another of my loss leaders came from a roll of 1955(P) Jefferson nickels, but that’s a completely different story.

At the moment, my collection of Mercury dimes consists of the four coins I’ve mentioned in this column plus a 1942/1 overdate NGC- graded AU-58 and a 1945- S, Micro S PCGS- graded MS-66. Both coins have CAC Green Beans. I paid $1,108 for the overdate in 2003, and its current CDN value is $2,000. The Micro S cost me $125 in 2003 and has a CDN value of $150.

After writing this column, I suspect I’ll have to add at least three more dimes to my collection of Mercuries: 1926- S, 1930- S and 1931- S. If you haven’t looked at Mercury dimes lately, check them out. There’s much to like in the series.