In 1954 the Bank of Canada issued its first series for Queen Elizabeth II, engraved faithfully from a Yousuf Karsh photograph, and the public found a demon grinning in the highlights of her hair. The plates were corrected from June 1956, which turned every printage in the series into a count with a deadline: 506,721,986 devil's face notes across eight denominations and two signature pairs, from the 106-million-note dollar down to a 2,400-note asterisk $5 that only the 880 proof Morgans of 1895 undercut anywhere in this record. The biography of the only variety an optical illusion ever wrote into the register.
Thirteen Morgan dollar issues carry the CC mark, and the series table shows something no other mintmark column on this site shows: a three-year hole. Carson City was built for the Comstock Lode, suspended on September 11, 1885 after Grover Cleveland's election, revived when Benjamin Harrison's funding arrived on July 1, 1889, and finished for good before June 1893. The restart produced the 350,000-piece 1889-CC, the king the vaults kept exactly one of, and the whole sixteen-year output fits three times inside Philadelphia's single 1921 run. The biography behind the most expensive two letters in the record.
Nine series into this record, the mintage column finally spans seven orders of magnitude, from a proof run of 880 to a single year of cents past 1.4 billion. So here is the whole file ranked: the cellar where a legendary San Francisco dollar shares a rung with an Ottawa fifty nobody talks about, the rung that equals zero, the all-cent wall at the top, and the reason the most famous key date in American collecting does not come close to the bottom ten.
In the other series of this register the famous coin is the small number. The Lincoln cent, the biggest table on the site at twenty-five billion coins, broke that rule five different ways: a typography fight, a decade of neglect, a worn die, a war metal, and one crooked hubbing each manufactured a key the mintage column never saw coming. The five mechanisms, with the fraud each one attracts.
This site records what the mints made. This article is about what got made afterward, in garages and back rooms, to imitate the rarest lines of the register. Every famous counterfeit in the American and Canadian series attacks a specific number on this site, because the mintage is the whole motive: fakes follow scarcity the way water follows grade. Here is the fraud taxonomy, series by series, with the tells, the doctrine, and the one habit that defeats all of it.
This site exists to record one number per issue: how many were made. But some of the biggest premiums in collecting live on things no mint or bank ever counted - a polished-away leg, a ghost of a 7 under an 8, a signature panel 2.4 millimetres too narrow. Here is the rule the whole catalog runs on: an issue gets a page when the record kept a number, and a note when it did not. This is why, and what it means when you are the one holding the coin.
In 1964 the United States Treasury stopped redeeming silver certificates for silver dollars, looked in its own vaults, and found about three million coins it had forgotten it owned. Nearly all of them were Carson City Morgan dollars. What happened next rewrote the survival record of an entire mint, and it is the best argument this site knows for keeping two numbers on every coin: what was struck, and what came back.
In August 1947, India became independent and five Latin letters on Canadian coins became untrue. The replacement dies had to come from London, they came late, and the delay manufactured both of Canada's greatest silver dollar rarities in a single year. Here is the Empire XI: eleven coins shaped by crowns, wars, and paperwork.
In 1918, the United States government fed more than a quarter of a billion silver dollars into the furnace and kept no record of which dates burned. Every coin on this site lives in the shadow of that decision. Here is the starting eleven of the Great Melt.