Every page on this site exists to hold one number, and until this month the numbers lived apart, each inside its own series, comparable only to its neighbours. Nine series in, the record finally spans the whole scale: the smallest figure in the file is 880 and the largest is 1,435,400,000, seven orders of magnitude between a Philadelphia proof run you could seat in a school auditorium and a single year of cents that outnumbers every human being alive when they were struck. So this article does the thing a record keeper eventually must. It ranks the column. Top of the table, bottom of the table, and the lesson that falls out when you stand them side by side.
The cellar
Start at the bottom, because the bottom is stranger than the top. The smallest figure attached to any coin in the record is 880: the 1895 Morgan dollar, the proof-only year, where the ledger also lists 12,000 business strikes that no one has ever authenticated a single survivor of. Below a thousand, the record stops being about commerce at all. Then the paper arrives. The smallest printage in the 1937 Canadian series is the $1000 Osborne-Towers at 15,000 notes, and the 1935 series keeps it company in the same cellar with the Jubilee twenty-five and the five hundred, whose own pages hold the figures. The smallest circulating coin figure on the entire site belongs to Ottawa too: the 1948 Canadian dollar, 18,780 pieces, a mint waiting on new dies from London while the year ran out, with the 1947 Maple Leaf it struck in the meantime one rung up at 21,135.
| Figure | Issue |
|---|---|
| 880 | 1895 Morgan dollar (proof only) |
| 15,000 | 1937 $1000, Osborne-Towers |
| 18,780 | 1948 Canadian silver dollar |
| 21,135 | 1947 Maple Leaf dollar |
| 35,401 | 1922 Peace dollar, high relief trial |
| 70,000 | 1937 $100, Osborne-Towers |
| 100,000 | 1893-S Morgan dollar |
| 100,000 | 1937 $50, Osborne-Towers |
| 208,000 | 1921-D Walking Liberty half |
| 264,000 | 1916-D Mercury dime |
Two things about this table are worth a long look. The first is the tie at 100,000. The lowest business-strike figure in the American coin series is the 1893-S Morgan, the most famous number in silver dollar collecting, and it shares its rung exactly with an Ottawa fifty-dollar note that most collectors have never heard of. Same figure, continents apart, one of them a legend and one of them a footnote, which says everything about how much work the surrounding series does. The second is who missed the cut. The 1909-S VDB, probably the most famous key date in all of American collecting, posts 484,000 and does not come close to the cellar. Fame and rank are different sports, which is the whole argument of The Keys Nobody Planned.
The rung that equals zero
One number belongs on the floor and refuses to stand there honestly. The 1964-D Peace dollar posts 316,076, which would slot it comfortably mid-cellar, except that every one of the 316,076 was melted and none may lawfully exist. The high relief trial above it at 35,401 is nearly as ghostly. The league ranks what the mints recorded striking, and the record is honest about the gap between a number and a survivor: some rungs on this ladder hold coins, and some hold only paperwork. The Pittman melt taught this site that lesson at the scale of 270 million, and the cellar teaches it retail.
The ceiling
Now the top, and the top belongs to one denomination so completely that the table almost feels rigged. Fourteen figures in the record stand above half a billion, and all fourteen are wheat cents. Four stand above a billion, all cents. The crown is 1944 Philadelphia at 1,435,400,000, one year of one coin from one city, struck on shell case bronze while the war was still on, followed by 1956-D, 1957-D and 1945 Philadelphia, each over a billion on its own. The only number from outside the Lincoln table that even approaches the wall is, fittingly for this site's cellar, a banknote: the 1937 Canadian dollar bill in its wide-panel Gordon printing, 460,000,000 notes, the largest figure in the 1937 series and bigger than anything any silver series ever produced.
| Figure | Issue |
|---|---|
| 1,435,400,000 | 1944 Lincoln cent, Philadelphia |
| 1,098,201,100 | 1956-D Lincoln cent |
| 1,051,342,000 | 1957-D Lincoln cent |
| 1,040,515,000 | 1945 Lincoln cent, Philadelphia |
| 991,655,000 | 1946 Lincoln cent, Philadelphia |
| 887,018,000 | 1941 Lincoln cent, Philadelphia |
| 800,953,300 | 1958-D Lincoln cent |
| 460,000,000 | 1937 Canadian $1, Gordon wide panel, the only non-cent in sight |
For scale: the largest silver figure in the American series is the 1921 Philadelphia Morgan at 44,690,000, the flood year that makes a common Morgan common. Drop that figure, the ceiling of a twenty-six-year dollar series, into the Lincoln table and it ranks 89th of 141 rows, in the bottom half, below years nobody has ever called anything but ordinary. The Lincoln table alone records 25,817,955,576 coins. The Mercury dime table, the only American silver series on this site that counts in the billions, records 2,676,523,880 across its entire thirty years, which the cent out-struck in its two best years.
What the league actually teaches
Here is the point of ranking the column, and it is not the trivia. The same number means opposite things on different pages. A figure of 484,000 is a famous catastrophe in the Lincoln table and would be an unremarkable mid-table year among Morgans. A figure of 100,000 is the king of one series and one-fifth of it would still make a 1937 banknote a key: the $50 Osborne is a prize at the same 100,000 that makes the 1893-S a legend, while the 1926-S Buffalo reigns over its series at 970,000, a figure that would mean nothing one table over. The mintage is the only number that never changes, but it never travels either. It carries meaning only inside its own series, against its own neighbours, which is why this site renders a hub per series instead of one long ladder, and why What the Mintage Cannot Count had to be written at all. The league table is a fine party trick. The series table is the record. Read the number where it lives.