As a youngster, finding a wheat cent was a near magical experience simply because they were “obsolete”. Now it appears the reverse design of the quarter that has been in place from 1932 to 1999 is obsolete. I find it odd that the old design clad quarters do not seem to have the same mystique as the wheat cents did. Is it simply because clad coinage never curried favor in collectible circles?
Correct... And it’s obvious why pre-1965 are collectible. I am curious why the 1965-1999 aren’t considered collectible. No different in my mind than finding a wheat cent in 1970. That was a magical moment.
Everything is collectible to the right person. But the public was not too enthusiastic in 1965 when the new clad quarters arrived because of the lack of silver. And that's why the Mint continued with the halves for a few years with 40% silver, just to placate the collectors mostly. I don't really know when the clad did become collectible again as a regular thing. The quarters kind of languished until the state series but towards the end petered out also. There was some dismay over the territories being added at the end. To be honest, I'm kind of sick of so many different quarters and I will be done when this ATB series ends. It gets old after awhile. Now, I'm just trying to top off all my sets with some missing key dates. If I live long enough I would like to pursue as best a collection as possible of Seated Liberty Dimes and maybe focus on some Seated Liberty Halves.
Some people have hoard 1982 and 1983 quarters... The reason is because there were no mint sets made those two years, so UNC-BU examples are scarce and considered semi-keys. Most people don’t know that though, and think that their heavily circulated 1982 and 1983 quarters are keys too or are valuable.
Quarters get worked hard- change given, vending machines, etc . Thus circulating quarters tend to get destroyed. It's extremely difficult to find quarters from circulation older than 5-10 years old that haven't been thru the wringer. Besides, there are very few dates that aren't readily available in high grades. If I want to spend some money, I can very easily obtain very nice (or avg nice) looking coins at very cheap prices for many dates. If I want to gamble, I can go buy most date's mint sets at relatively little mark-up over the coin's face value. Don't get me wrong- I still pull nice looking quarters when I see them. It just isn't very efficient and I doubt many of the coins I've pulled will ever be considered collectible by today's very high standards for MS coins.
1965 - 1998 are all clad. I'm just having fun collecting them. There are few people who are also collecting them and I'm sure of it. They are not worth more than their face value but my intent is to collect as much as I can and hand them over to my kids. I'm sure they are going to be worth more because some collectors are just not going to pay the premium value for them regardless that they are not silver.
