When will I get my hands on them?

Have you ordered your “S” mintmarked El Yunque quarter rolls or bags yet?

I put my order in with others at the company on the first day the coins became available on June 21. The allure of the “S” mintmark still pulls at my collector heart strings.

I see by the results of the first four days of sales that I am not alone. Collectors have snapped up 614,700 of the coins. That makes the initial Mint expectation of striking about 1.4 million of the coins look like pretty good planning.

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Buyers took 3,827 100-coin bags and 5,800 of the 40-coin rolls in the initial wave of demand. I expect demand in the opening days to be highest just as it is for any other Mint offer. Then it will fall off. The question is how fast?

I am waiting for the sales numbers for the following week as this is written to see just how this pattern plays out. You should find the latest figures in the Mint Statistics column. The July 4 holiday mandated that I write this column before I saw the updated figures.

If final demand falls somewhere in the 1.4 million range for this quarter, what does that suggest will happen for the following four designs?

The Chaco coin will go on sale July 12, giving collectors who are excited by the new 5-coin program another quick jolt following the electricity of buying the first “S” quarter struck as a standard circulating coin since 1954.

This quick second issue might also cause undecided collectors to fall by the wayside early in the program.

Already my mind is filled with thoughts of a set of quarters with mintages of less than 1.4 million coins. That figure is a large number if we are talking about proof silver Eagles or even regular proof sets, but for a set of coins with an average cost of about 50 cents each, that’s not all that many. I would think it could see quite a pop in price over the next five years.

As soon as the 2012-S quarters go off sale, we might see dealers or collectors who had the foresight to put aside these coins in quantity to offer sets for up to 10 times issue price, especially if they put the coins in a nice holder of some kind.

Would you pay $9.95, $15.95 or $24.95 for a nice set of five coins housed in this fashion? A good marketer will come up with the right price point and profit accordingly.

I know I am jumping the gun a bit, but that is what the reappearance of the “S” mintmark does to me in a way that the proof “S” mintmarks never did.

There is something about trying to find coins with the “S” mintmark that will never leave me. It was very hard to find even the 1955-S cent for my 1941-to-date Lincoln cent album back in the mid 1960s. I saw only one other in the following 46 years.

These “S” marked quarters are wonderful things. They are low priced. If nothing happens to them on the secondary market, I won’t squawk. But they just might catch on and then I will nod knowing that there are still a lot of collectors out there who have the same feelings about them as I do.