The Society of Silver Dollar Collectors is celebrating it's 35th year with some commissioned Dan Carr overstrikes. Obverses are mash-ups of a few different Morgan and Peace dollars, reverses are a common commemorative design.

I'm continuing my tradition of offering nice wall calendars with some photos I've taken over the years. I've been making these since 2009. Heavy card stock, A4-size pages with a spiral binding. I should be ready to ship within the next week or two. $25 each shipped in the US. Let me know if you're interested in reserving one for your wall!

Although most of what I attribute is VAMs, I will label anything that is cataloged as a variety for which I can find attribution materials, from Fugio cents to gold. Here's a nice DDO on a 1940-S FS-101 dime, also cataloged by CONECA as DDO-002 and DDR-001.

The 1883-O VAM 1C is a rare variety that shows an interesting artifact of improper die hardening. There's a depressed halo around the left wreath. Originally thought to be a result of over-buffing the die, it's actually the effect of decarbonization of the die steel close to the surface. When dies were hardened in the 19th century, they couldn't use a vacuum, so they packed the dies in charcoal to try and keep oxygen away from the die steel. Presence of oxygen and a hot die would cause carbon in the die steel to leech out and bond with the atmospheric oxygen, lowering the carbon content of the die close to the surface, making it too soft to strike very many coins.

Compared with early coppers and bust halves, cataloging VAMs is still very much an ongoing process. Since the beginning of 2022, there have been about 500 changes to the VAM catalog. Some new varieties, some deleted, some revised, some reclassified, all in an effort to make the VAM catalog more complete and robust.