Whitman Liberty Walking Halves Album 9423, Empty, c. 1960–1970

The Piece

A Whitman Bookshelf coin album for Liberty Walking half dollars, No. 9423, published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, with a 1960 copyright printed inside. Navy blue leatherette over boards. The front cover carries the title in gilt, and a vertical panel of gilt lattice set with stars runs down the hinge side, broken at its center by Whitman's winged eagle device. The spine repeats the title and the date range in gilt with the catalog number 9423 at the foot.

This album is empty. There are no coins in it and none are included. Every opening across all three pages is vacant, and it is offered as the album alone.

The interior is the classic Whitman arrangement. Three stiff pages, each drilled with circular openings labeled by date and mint, running from 1916 through 1940-S, with the sliding clear acetate windows still in place on both faces so a coin can be seen from either side. The inside front cover carries Whitman's own description of the design and a complete table of quantities minted, year by year, from 608,000 for the 1916 to over twelve million for the 1917. The inside back cover lists the entire Whitman album series of the period, cents through dollars, with Canadian, British, Mexican and Philippine sets at the bottom.

It covers what Whitman called Number One, 1916 to 1940 inclusive. The second album in the series picked up 1941 through 1947.

History & Provenance

Whitman grew out of Western Printing and Lithographing of Racine, Wisconsin, which began printing juvenile books around 1915 and took the Whitman name after the Chicago firm it printed for went under. For most of the century Whitman was known for children's books, Big Little Books and Disney licenses. Then in the mid 1930s it started producing coin boards, and in doing so helped turn coin collecting from a gentleman's pursuit into something a child could start with pocket change. In 1946 it published the first Guide Book of United States Coins, the Red Book, which has since sold more than twenty five million copies.

The coins this album was built to hold were designed by Adolph A. Weinman. In 1916 the Mint director had the Commission of Fine Arts run a competition to replace the Barber coinage, and Weinman's work was chosen. On the obverse, Liberty strides toward the sun rising on the eastern horizon, the flag billowing behind her, laurel and oak branches gathered in one arm. The Treasury described her as progressing toward the dawn of a new day, with the branches standing for civil and military glory. On the reverse a bald eagle perches on a mountain crag with its wings unfolded and a pine sapling rising from a crevice in the rock.

The coin was struck from 1916 to 1947, roughly 485 million circulation pieces. It was also a famously difficult design. The relief was too high, the metal threw a fin at the edge that jammed vending machines, and the Mint cut the figure down and lowered the relief in response. Attempts to sharpen the details in 1918, 1937 and 1938 did little, and the striking problems are part of why the Franklin half replaced it. Weinman's Liberty did not disappear, though. The obverse was adapted in 1986 for the American Silver Eagle and has been struck every year since.

Whitman's own text inside the front cover quotes that 1916 Treasury language directly, calls the eagle fearless in spirit, and points out something most people never notice: the designer's monogram AW sits near the edge of the coin beneath the eagle's left wing. It also reminds the collector that Weinman designed the dime as well.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Say it once more plainly: there are no coins in this. What you are buying is the album.

That turns out to be the interesting part. Empty, it reads on a shelf as a slim navy volume with a gilt lattice spine, and it holds its own next to leather bindings at a fraction of what they cost. The gilt is bright, the blue is deep, and the lattice panel is a better piece of graphic design than most books of its decade got.

It is also an artifact of how Americans learned to collect. Whitman albums and folders put a cardboard grid and a set of empty holes into millions of households, and the empty hole is the thing that did the work. Anyone who filled one as a child recognizes this object on sight. Collectors have begun buying the albums themselves for that reason, and plenty get thrown out each year by people who assume the container is worth nothing without the contents.

Put it on a shelf, on a desk, in a study, or in a collection of American printed ephemera. Or fill it, which is what it was made for, and let the empty holes do their work again.