DESERT MOON NEWSLETTER, ISSUE 14, October 1, 2025

Great Bust Quarters Are Hard To Find

Desertmoonnm.com

Hi Folks,

            Somehow I managed to miss posting the Issue 13 slated for September. As luck would have it, I am getting Issue 14 out on the 1rst day of October………….

            I’ve collected Bust Quarters including the Draped, Large-Size Capped, and Small-Size Capped types, for over a decade.  It seems to me that pq examples worthy of CAC were easier to find back then.  When we started Desert Moon in April of 2024, we had 53 examples to sell from my collected accumulation, almost all of them CACed.  Now there are only 4 left of this initial inventory.  During these 17 months since, I have not been able to purchase any until the ANA WFOM in late August. And even of the 5 I obtained, 2 of those were immediately purchased from me at the show.  Simply put, there is a paucity of great bust quarters available on the market right now.  When they get listed on other dealer websites, they go quickly as long as they are pq for the grade with CAC stickers.  In auctions, rarely do these go for as low as retail guide prices and it seems the sky is the limit. Out of the 53 we sold, I have only seen one of these pop us again, which means it was purchased for resale.  The rest appear to be in strong hands and likely not to appear again on the market for some time to come.  Hence a paucity of great bust quarters available. 

            I collect these series because they offer so much in terms of variety. All I can say is, in recent years, apparently enough other collectors are collecting them to sweep the market clean quickly when they are offered.

Getting back to their variety, there are over 80 die marriages with multiple die states across the 3 Bust Quarter series.  Almost every example of these will be unique in some way.  This makes them fascinating to collect, and obtaining pq examples is simply, very hard.  The series has mostly low mintages compared to say, many bust half and early cent issues. So this, in combination with the complexity exhibited in die marriages and states, explains the appeal and the challenges a numismatist has collecting them.  In either case, we try to get them when pq and offer them up.

We have 10 newps listed and ready for your viewing.  All of them are either silver or gold.  One of them, Libby, tells her life story in her listing.  We still have unlisted newps to work through and get up on the website including some pretty cool new copper.  We may list them during October without putting up a newsletter.  So please check back.

  One other note about our photography.  You may have noticed that sometimes we now have multiple images of a coin. The idea is these are taken at slightly different orientations where the light will play differently across the surfaces.  This gives the viewer more insight about luster and surfaces than just a single image does.  So for coins where luster is important, we are trying to do this.

Thanks for reading, and as always, you can inquire about our offerings by emailing us at desertmoonnm@yahoo.com.

Here are a few of the newps:

Meet Libby