Owner Comments:
Mintage: 581,036
After picking up the first two coins in the set in a wild weekend I waited just two weeks to follow up with this, the 3rd coin in the set.
I went with an MS65 - a burning need to build this set made me too impatient to sit around waiting to see if an MS66 would come up - that's what upgrades are for! That comes later, right?!? MS66 examples aren't especially rare but they don't pop up all the time. As the set has developed it's become increasingly less likely that I'd choose to replace or upgrade this coin given that it's now part of a theme for the set of having coins in old fatty holders with 195XXX or 196XXX serial numbers.
Anyway... At MS65 it fit my goals for the set of having "attractive coins at grades of MS65 or better." It's well struck and shiny after over 130 years in a way that few things other than gold can be after such a long span of years.
Picking up this coin also meant that, with just the first 3 coins in the set, all 3 of the reverse designs for the series were represented. That’s one of the things about this set that can be a little crazy to think about. The man reigned for a very solid 41.5 years. This coin was only issued in 10 of those years over a 15-year period of his reign and they still somehow managed to use 3 slightly different reverse designs in that time. Admittedly, the differences between the 1889/1889 and the other KM-106 coins is just that the mint had a different Mint Master, and, therefore, a new privy mark. Still, it seems kind of funny.
Last Rev: 03/2020