[The following excerpt is published courtesy of DLRC Press and its author, David W. Lange. This information was originally published in 2005 in The Complete Guide to Mercury Dimes]

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MINTAGE: 9,939,000 (Ranking 29/77)

POPULAR VARIETIES: A number of die crack formations are known (photo), most notably the familiar wingtip to rim crack.

RARITY: 1919-D is common only in the lowest circulated grades and as mediocre Mint State coins. Although split band specimens are usually available, fully raised bands are rare. Since the certification services utilize a definition of FB which is slightly more liberal than the one presented in Chapter 4, the figures below for full bands likely include a few of the better split band coins, as well Not surprisingly, just a single example of this issue has been certified as MS-67 and none finer.

COMMENTS: Peripheral weakness is common, although less so than for 1918-D. The example which illustrates this date is exceptionally well struck.

Writing in 1980 for The Coin Dealer Newsletter, dealer Rick Sear reported having recently seen three and a half uncirculated rolls of this date.12 As usual, many of these possessed split and only slightly rounded bands. The existence in roll quantities of any Mercury Dime dated earlier than the mid 1920s was unusual, even a quarter century ago, and it’s a certainty that these coins have since been dispersed.

The Denver Mint used 51 obverse dies to produce an average of 196,776 dimes per die and 38 reverse dies to coin some 264,094 pieces per die.13 A comparison of these figures with those from 1918 shows that while the average number of coins per die varied greatly from one mint to another, the number remained roughly equal at any given mint from one year to the next.