Talk:Victor Brenner

This should be merged with Victor David Brenner. ColinKennedy 18:43, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

VDB content
Here is the content from the old Victor David Brenner page. Victor David Brenner (1871 – 1924) was an American artist and sculptor (born in Lithuania) whose relief image of Abraham Lincoln on the occasion of the centennial of the sixteenth president's birth so impressed President Theodore Roosevelt that Brenner was invited to design a new one-cent coin. The Lincoln Wheat Ears Cent which was minted from 1909 to 1958 marked the first U.S. coin design to carry a portrait of an actual person, not merely a model (Native Americans and Lady Liberty had been popular images.) The reverse side was redesigned for the 1959 year with the Lincoln Memorial design that has continued to the present day. One of the more valuable coins to collectors is the 1909 San Francisco, California-minted "VDB" penny, so-named because the designer's initials were included between the stalks of wheat on the lower reverse side; a limited number (only 484,000) of which were produced before a public outcry at the designer's initials being so prominently displayed. The initials were removed and in 1918 added to the obverse side in greatly reduced letter size. While with a mintage of almost 28 million the 1909 Philadelphia mint VDB cent is quite inexpensive, even poor quality examples of the 1909-S VDB coin bring hundreds of dollars and a high grade mint condition example can sell for $6000 to $12000 or more.