1809/8 $5 BD-1 MS(PCGS#507603)

February 2026 Showcase Auction - The James A. Stack, Sr. Collection Part II

Auctioneer

Stack's Bowers

Lot Number

23014

Grade

MS63

Price

42,000

Lot Description

A luster-drenched joy, exquisitely frosty with even lemon yellow gold on the obverse and highlight tones of rose and ice blue in areas of the reverse. A splash of pastel blue and violet is seen beneath the final A of AMERICA. The visual appeal is excellent on both sides, and the fields are essentially pristine and mark free. Adjustment marks manifest in the denticles around most of the obverse circumference, but both obverse and reverse fields and devices show no traces of them. The obverse shows only the most subtle, trivial hairlines and a single vertical mark left of star 10. The reverse is close to immaculate. A light die crack is seen along the outer points of stars 1 through 3, some hub rust apparently on the chest of Liberty, vestiges of a die clash above the eagle have mostly been lapped away on the reverse. The overdate aspect on the final date digit, shared by all examples of this date, is visible under low magnification.<p><p>Very few Mint State survivors of this issue could surpass this coin on technical merits, and fewer still could outpace its fine visual appeal and rich originality. With its unmolested color and superb unbroken cartwheel, this piece evokes a found treasure more than an object that has been bought and sold among collectors for generations. CAC has approved just seven examples at higher grades than this one, along with seven other examples at this grade level. We have not offered a PCGS MS-63 with CAC approval since March 2018. Since that time, we've offered just a single example finer than this, a MS-64+ (PCGS) CAC piece that brought $69,000 in our Summer 2025 Global Showcase Auction.<p><p>This is almost certainly the F.C.C. Boyd coin, sold by Numismatic Gallery in the January 1946 "World's Greatest Collection of U.S. Gold Coins" sale as lot 355. While plate matching cannot be trusted due to the reuse of photographs in this era, the price of the WGC coin - $60 - matches the price Stack paid for this coin. That 1946 appearance is one of two Akers reports of a Mint State example during Stack's active collecting era.