1909 Liberty Nickel with Class III Doubling

CoinTalk forum member KBBPLL, who is a Barber afficionado, turned me on to this a while back. 1909 was the first year that the date was present in the master die. As a result, the date position was fixed and 1908 marked the last year of the possibility of a legitimately repunched date. It turns out that another change was made to the model in 1909. The word LIBERTY was strengthened and the B reshapen from the "Beer Belly B" (his term, not mine, but I like it) that had been used since the 1882 J-1690 patterns to a normal looking B. (CoinFacts pictures below, desaturated and contrast boosted)

Beer Belly B

Normal B

This must have gnawed at someone sufficiently over the preceding 27 years that effort was taken to modify it, and only it, on the 1909 model. Perhaps Barber saw it as an opportunity to fix something he didn't want to admit was a problem with the design's aesthetics.

It turns out there are some coins that feature a broken or severely stenotic (keeping with the health assessment theme) Beer Belly B in LIBERTY. This turns out to be the most visible sign of design hub doubling, where unfinished (i.e., undated) leftover dies from 1908 were to be used in 1909. There was no date punch in 1909, as it was in the master. This meant that the only way to date an older, undated die was to hub it again with the dated "Normal B" hub, giving this result (my newp shown).

The design hub doubling at bottom and left of LI as well as a pinched upper curve of the B are the result of this re-hubbing of the leftover unfinished die.

I don't know how common or rare these are. They exist both as proofs and business strikes and are maybe 10% of the mintage. I base this estimate only on how long it took me to find one to buy and how many I saw in the CoinFacts pictures. The 1909 proof mintage was unusually high, due to the introduction of the Lincoln cent increasing the demand for proof coinage that year.

Here's the kicker, though. The 1910-13 dies all have the Beer Belly B with no design hub doubling, so the normal B is a one-year minor type. It seems that since the mint hadn't changed the date on a die before, they took the easy way out and created a 1910 master die by either dating an old 1908 master die or by using a 1908 hub to make a master die, then adding the date to it. The 1909 master die couldn't be used further, since it was dated. The revised model couldn't be used since it was dated when it was created. JD speaks of a "19"-dated hub seen during a mint visit in 2015. Presumably this was made from a 1908 master die that was partially dated. It doesn't seem to have been used, however, since the 1910, 11, and 12 date positions, while consistent within each year, differ slightly among each other.

Anyway, here's the coin I bought. PCGS 64. Not a wowzer Liberty Nickel by any stretch, but cool for what I wanted.