Dead Presidents

Matthew Healey for the NY Times reports The United States Mint is unveiling four designs for one-dollar coins today, featuring likenesses of the first four presidents. They begin a series that is to last a decade and portray every deceased president. The first coin, displaying George Washington on one side and the Statue of Liberty on the other, will go into circulation in mid-February, in time for Presidents’ Day. After that, coins with John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison will be issued at three-month intervals. Four more will appear, in order of each president’s service, every year until 2016. Designs are based on presidential medals made previously by the Mint and on portraits in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where today’s unveiling takes place. (…) The coins were authorized last year by a law that also provides for a series of 24-karat $10 gold coins honoring all the presidents’ wives, which will be sold to collectors and investors rather than released for general circulation. The first of those, showing Martha Washington, will be issued before the end of 2007. The law also calls for four new designs for the penny in 2009, to commemorate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth.