1979-P

The 1979-P is the headline circulation issue of the inaugural year, with Philadelphia striking 360,222,000 pieces, the single highest mintage in the entire Susan B. Anthony series. The new dollar arrived under the Susan B. Anthony Dollar Coin Act of October 1978, which had shrunk the format from the 38.1 mm Eisenhower dollar to a 26.5 mm copper-nickel clad piece weighing 8.1 grams. Frank Gasparro designed both sides, with the obverse portrait of Anthony adapted from a 19th-century photograph and the reverse a miniaturized version of his Eisenhower dollar eagle landing on the moon. Public adoption stalled within months because the new dollar's diameter, color, and reeded edge all sat too close to the Washington quarter for cashiers and consumers to keep them straight. Federal Reserve banks absorbed most of the production into vault stock rather than commercial channels.

Two die configurations exist for the 1979-P, separated by the position of the date relative to the inner border. The Type 1 Narrow Rim, also called Far Date, is the standard issue and accounts for the great majority of the 360 million. The Type 2 Wide Rim, or Near Date, emerged mid-year from a die-modification effort intended to strengthen the rim, and its top of the 9 nearly touches the inner border. Wide Rim coins are catalogued and priced separately on this site; for the standard 1979-P, authentication concerns are limited to confirming Mint State surfaces, since the high-relief portrait dulls quickly under any handling. PCGS, the Professional Coin Grading Service, and NGC populations cluster at MS65 and MS66, with MS67 examples scarce enough to support a real top-tier premium.

The 1979-P is a regular common date in raw form and inexpensive in certified MS65 or MS66, with sealed Treasury bags still trading at coin shows. The collecting interest sits in the launch story it anchors and in the Wide Rim variety that fell out of the same Philadelphia run rather than in any rarity attached to the standard issue itself. For the wider design history and the failure of the size-confusion experiment, see the Susan B. Anthony Dollar series history.