Well I took the time to count a few more cents for the cent project today. I pulled out the bag of 1969s and went through them. A total of 45 and I was surprised to find that 33 were from the Denver mint.

Surprised that is until I pulled out my copy of the Red Book and looked them up. That was a bumper year for the Denver mint with 4,002,832,200 cents minted there. Nearly 4 times as many as at Philadelphia (I had 11) and San Francisco only minted a little less then 3 million of which I found 1. It was also interesting to note that although several of my 1959 cents were full red and AU in condition, the 1969 cents were all well worn.

So I've been counting pennies tonight. Quite a while ago I signed up to be a volunteer for the Cent Project. An effort to get a picture of cents in circulation around the country. Volunteers bought $50 worth of circulated cents at banks and counted it, sorting mints and varieties, then turned in their data for publication at the project's website http://www.thecentproject.com/ .

At least that is how it is supposed to work. 5000 cents is a lot to sort by year and count. (I had to hit 2 banks to get that many too) I got as far as a preliminary sort by the last digit of the date. Judging by the lack of updates to the website I am not alone! Seriously, I have no idea if this project went forward at all, but there are no new posts since the count was declared on.

So tonight I started on my bag of nines. I found 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989 and 1999. No surprises here, the smallest group was the '59s and the largest the 99's (I bought the coins in December of 2007 so no 09's.) I also was pleased to note a couple of 1919s (P & D) and the real surprise, a 1889 Indian Head! So far I've only sorted the 16 1959 cents into 13 P and 3 D. I'm saving the larger amounts for later. Eventually I will mail in my counts if anyone is collecting them anymore, and in the meantime, I will publish them here.

Someone musta broke into their stash of old change recently. My lucky day when I stopped to pick up a retirement card for a co-worker the other day. In my change I got 3 wheaties! All in nice condition, about EF, and in date sequence 1955, 1956, 1957. Alas, the '55 is not the doubled die, but still nice to find. Just a short post today as I am busy posting pictures for the Ancient Peddler auction. A great place to find rare and ancient coins at low prices! I just bought a 15th century Hungarian silver as I type this and have my eye on an 1860 Indian Head.