1918/7-S 25C Standing Liberty Quarter Dollar PCGS VF25 (CAC)

Popular and rare overdate variety!

David Hall writes, "The 1918/7-S Standing Liberty quarter is one of the key date silver coin rarities of the 20th century. This variety was first noticed in the late 1930's and the first auction appearance was in December, 1937. Collectors began saving the few they could find in circulation. Today, the 1918/7-S is rare and relatively expensive even in the lowest grades. Mint state specimens are very rare and specimens with fully struck heads are extremely rare."

PCGS has graded 53 examples as VF25, with 514 finer. In CAC, there are 8 in VF25 with 71 finer.

Photo of the overdate of the 1918/7-S Standing Liberty quarter, courtesy of the PCGS Coinfacts website.

This extremely popular variety was the result of a die blank that was initially impressed with a hub with the date 1917, and then was given a second impression from another one dated 1918. A mistake such as this probably took place late in the calendar year, when dies for mintage in 1917 or 1918 were being prepared. Then by pure chance this one die was then stamped with the 'S' mintmark and sent off to the San Francisco Mint.

The people at the Coining Department in San Francisco probably did not notice the overdate, for they were too busy in their work producing coins to carefully study a die for such an error. As noted above by David Hall, this variety was not discovered until the 1930s. At that time, there were few original roles of 1918-S quarters to search. Writes NGC Coin Explorer, "The coins that entered circulation quickly lost their dates, as was typical of this coin type, so it's doubtful that more than several hundred examples are known today in all grades combined."