[The following excerpt is published courtesy of DLRC Press and its author, David W. Lange. This information was originally published in 2005 in The Complete Guide to Mercury Dimes]
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MINTAGE: 16,132,000 (Ranking 36/77)
POPULAR VARIETIES: At least five repunched mintmarks have been reported, and three of these are illustrated (photos).
RARITY: Mint State examples are not rare, but the quality conscious buyer will be dismayed. Lustrous, fully struck coins are scarce. Original rolls may yet exist, but these will ultimately be broken in search of gem singles for submission to the grading services.
Four 1936-D dimes have been certified as MS-68 FB.
COMMENTS: Many 1936-D dimes are plagued by deep and irregular die polishing lines. Although mint made, these flaws may impair a coin’s luster and are visually distracting. They will also have a negative impact on the coin’s certified grade, since this is so heavily dependent on surface quality.
Note the significant drop in value for MS-63 between 1985 and 1995. What happened? A likely explanation is that the rarity of such coins was widely misunderstood before the advent of certified grading population reports. These debuted in the late 1980s and quickly dispelled many myths about the relative rarity of popular coins. The author was collecting choice and gem Mercury Dimes in the mid-1970s until the market in these coins exploded around 1978. Prices for dates from 1934 onward seemed to quadruple in just a couple of years, leading this writer and many others to look elsewhere for a collectable series. The high prices for gem Mercury Dimes largely survived the overall market setback of 1980-82, but they could not survive the revelation by certified population reports that they were not so rare, after all. Values for these later dates in the series have never fully recovered their pre-certification price levels.
