Q coins sold for $7,200
Stack’s Bowers Galleries offered the Q. David Bowers Collection of Vermont Coppers on June 18, representing the personal collection of the famed researcher.
Bowers wrote the 2018 book The Copper Coins of Vermont and Interrelated Issues 1783–1788, where he explained the charm of the short-lived series of around 40 varieties, explaining, “About 30 can be collected by anyone with a modest budget combined with a keen interest in the coins and the patience to wait until a coin that is ‘just right’ comes along. The privately issued copper coins made by Ruben Harmon, Jr. and his partners for the Republic of Vermont dated 1785 to 1788 circulated widely in early America at a value of about a halfpenny.”
Bowers recalled viewing the Vermont copper coins in the collections of the American Numismatic Society while at its location in Audubon Terrace on Broadway between 155th and 156th streets, and examining the collections of Vermont’s Bennington Museum, starting his own collection of Vermont coppers by die varieties in 1954. “Red Book” editor emeritus Kenneth L. Bressett’s classification system based on the 39 varieties published in “The Vermont Copper Coinage” in Studies on Money in Early America published in 1976 by the ANS represented a “giant step forward” toward wider collecting interest in these Vermont coppers, as did the 1988 publication of Walter Breen’s Complete Encyclopedia of U.S. and Colonial Coins. More recent publications have focused on more detailed aspects of the production of Vermont coppers and the later Machin’s Mills issues.
On collecting the series, Bowers writes, “Building a collection of Vermont coppers can be an exciting, stimulating challenge,” since much of it has to do with variables related to eye appeal for these often crudely struck bronze issues with frequently porous surfaces. “Each Vermont copper has its own personality,” he writes.
https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins/q-david-bowers-sells-his-collection-of-vermont-coppers