[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: 56,860,000 (Ranking 63/77)
POPULAR VARIETIES: At least seven doubled-die obverses are known.55 Most of these are very minor and of interest only to variety specialists. The most popular one is illustrated (photo).
While not strictly qualifying as a variety, photos are included here of a dime whose dies suffered a clashing. The dies struck one another, due perhaps to a failure of the feeder fingers to set a planchet between them. Each die received an inverted impression of its opposite, and these shallow, raised lines were then imparted to each coin struck from the dies until the clash marks were removed through lapping.
RARITY: Common in all popularly collected grades, original rolls may exist.
COMMENTS: This is perhaps the most common Philadelphia Mint dime of the 1930s in Mint State condition. A large coinage accounts in part for this availability, but a more important factor is the number of pieces saved by the roll. Unlike in earlier years, when Mercury Dimes were saved primarily as singles, the practice of roll collecting was firmly in place by the mid-1930s.
Advertisements from the 1930s and early ‘40s usually were directed toward the selling of recent date, Uncirculated coins, either as singles or by the roll. With only a few exceptions, Uncirculated Mercury Dimes dated before 1929 were rarely to be found within these ads. The only ones which could be purchased with ease were 1916(P), 1916-S and 1917(P). Periodic offerings of Philadelphia Mint dimes from the pre-1929 period were seen, but mintmarked examples from the years 1918 through 1928 were seldom advertised. To the author’s knowledge, the first comprehensive offering of Uncirculated Mercury Dimes was the ad placed by dealer John R. Stewart of Milwaukee in the January 1940 issue of The Numismatist. It’s likely that most dealers could supply the desired coins upon request, but they did not maintain sufficient inventory to warrant advertising these scarcer dates.
