Visible on the obverse (at Liberty’s hip and on that line near the rim) are what appear in the photograph to be cuts, but which are actually planchet laminations. There is a die break running the entire length of the date at its top, and on the reverse there are several small die breaks extending from star-tips out toward the rim. So while this decently preserved 1918s quarter-dollar is a mint foreman’s nightmare…
What it isn’t, is the prize created by the same set of wartime exigencies, the 1918/7s Standing Liberty overdate, also coined in 1918 at San Francisco.
This 1918s 25-cent piece is a wartime coin, and the American coin hobby has slowly revised one of its favorite stories—rampant when I was a boy, and later, too—that the chain-mail of this type two SL quarter was added because the public was outraged by the bare-breasted Liberty of the type one SL quarter coined in 1916 and early 1917.
Nowadays it’s widely acknowledged that the armor was added because the earlier version of Liberty just didn’t do the job. That is, she didn’t look ready to defend the nation (the design’s stated purpose). Instead, Liberty looked vulnerable; pretty, very artistic, but vulnerable.
This wartime coin was also a peacetime coin, and beginning with the 12th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, this 1918s quarter began to struggle with a new set of difficulties…
v.