Robot Claw

About 100 of the pressed pennies in the collection are from the USA, not including the NYC ones I covered yesterday. While a few are hard to decipher, I think I have pennies from eleven states: New York, California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Florida, Connecticut, Vermont, Nevada and Hawaii.

These can be divided into two broad groups: attraction specific and location specific. The above are examples of the former, which were pressed at tourist attractions in Salem, Rochester, Gilroy and Orlando. Salem in particular was a treasure trove of penny machines, and there’s at least a dozen different ones in the collection.

Here’s some more pressed at tourist attractions. You can see the variety of size here, which varies depends on the strength of the machine. When you turn the crank on the older machines you can feel the gears turning as the die squashes the penny, but many of the newer machines are electronic and the pennies they vend are usually of identical size.

The above are some location-specific examples. Strangely, considering Bernard and I have been there a few times, there’s only a single Vegas penny in the collection. The detail on the one on the right (from New Hampshire) is extremely high, which I noted since I’ve read on collectors sites that some believe the overall quality of the dies & machines is declining.

A few years ago on our northeast road trip Kristin and I hunted pennies for Bernard as part of a deal I’d made with him. We used a website to track down machines, prepared a bag of quarters and clean coins, and in those few days pressed a total of 72 pennies! It was fun finding new machines and a little disappointing when we found broken ones.

I believe the above two were obtained on that trip, and they’re the only ones I have with sports teams on them. Usually I never would have pressed these, but my goal was to astonish Bernard with an abundance of new coins 🙂

Pennies often share themes, and I’ve got a few with the US flag and sharks, but the most common motif in the collection is mermaids! All five are shown above, from four different cities. You can see the ones from Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz have the same art, albeit at a slightly different size.

I’m not done with US coins, and tomorrow I’ll have a few subsets. Including perhaps the most ‘valuable’ coins in this small collection…

This is a pressed penny:

The first ‘elongated penny’ dates back to 1893, where for the first time a machine squashed pennies into souvenirs at the Chicago Worlds Fair. Since then people have been pressing and collecting them and tens of thousands of different designs exist.

The typical machine looks like the above: you put in two quarters (the cost) and one penny, then turn a crank and a die squashes the penny imprinting a picture or phrase onto it as a souvenir. Most machines have 4 or more styles available, so getting all four ends up costing $2.04. These machines are often seen at tourist sites here in the USA, and variants exist in other countries worldwide.

Collectors store these pennies in dedicated books and folders, and one such enthusiast was Bernard. Now though, his collection has been passed onto me. There are several reasons for this, but I think the two most pertinent are:
1) Bernard has many talents, but unlike myself he doesn’t have the heart of a true collector.
2) The vast majority of the pennies in his collection were purchased and pressed by me!

So in essence Bernard was taking care of my penny collection for a couple of decades, and now he’s passed them back to me 🙂

After removing them all from their little books, sorting, cataloguing and putting them all back into a much larger book it’s time to showcase this collection of 271 pennies, and each day this week I’ll have a variety to show.

We’ll start today with pennies pressed in New York City.

There are over 60 different pennies in this collection that were obtained in NYC, often from tourist sites but some from various shops. The above 16 were all pressed using a machine at the very top of the One World Trade observatory that I visited this past summer. (The photo is black and white since the reflective pennies are difficult to photograph and this seems the best way to show detail.)

This photo shows famous tourist sites in pressed penny form: Times Square, the Empire State Building, the (old) World Trade Center and a Kong atop the ESB. At the start of this post you saw one of four different Statue Of Liberty pennies in the collection. I’ve also got pennies showing Rockefeller Center, Ellis Island, Broadway and the NYC skyline.

Pennies aren’t just at tourist sites, and several big shops in NYC – usually near Times Square – have machines inside for tourists to use. From these we obtained a shocking dozen different M&M’s pennies, a few Forrest Gump pennies, a variety of portraits (from Madame Tussaud’s) and a few tourist elongates emblazoned with the Ben & Jerry’s logo.

There’s also cute examples like these. As mentioned the vast majority of these pennies I had pressed myself, and my rule (since I was always sending them to Bernard) was to prioritize tourist sights over the ‘lucky’ type but in actuality this sort of thing is common in the machines.

At almost 25% of the collection the NYC pennies are the largest subset, but in many ways they are the least interesting. As this week progresses you can look forward to a wide range of unusual pennies from other locations, and even from countries that don’t even use pennies at all. Stay tuned…