8.4 Elongates
Elongated coins are a common souvenir of large events or popular attractions. At such events is it common to find a machine that will flatten, elongate, and place a design on a host coin
that is supplied by the user. These coins are typically on one-cent pieces in the modern era, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many different denominations of coins were used.
Regardless of the time in history, twenty-cent pieces were rarely elongated and examples are quite rare.
Below is a rare elongated twenty-cent piece from the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York with a 1940 impression of The Merry Jitterbugs. While The Merry Jitterbugs is considered to
be a fairly scarce elongated impression on any coin, on a twenty-cent piece there are presently only two known examples. A few other classic varieties of elongated twenty-cent
pieces exist and all are rare.
Elongated twenty-cent piece – “World’s Fair Greetings 1940, The Merry Jitterbugs”
The above example is particularly interesting because the host coin had sufficient enough detail and multi-shade original toning that the design of the coin remained
through the elongation and it can easily be identified as an 1875-S.
