Robert Lamb

Most coin designers are sculptors first. Robert Bennett Lamb was a calligrapher — a man who spent his life drawing letters by hand, and who one day talked the U.S. government into letting him do the same thing on gold.

Lamb was born in Cranston, Rhode Island, on May 25, 1922. He graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in 1944, then turned to art: a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1952, and a Master of Fine Arts from Cornell University in 1954. He settled in Lincoln, Rhode Island, where he lived and worked. He died on February 26, 2012, at 89.

He is not a famous name. His reputation in numismatics — the study and collecting of coins and money — rests on a single, surprising year. In 1991 his hand-drawn lettering appeared on two United States commemorative coins, and one of them broke a rule that had held for the entire history of the Mint.

In 1990 Congress authorized coins to mark the 50th anniversary of Mount Rushmore, finished in 1941. The Mint ran a design competition, and more than a dozen artists entered. The final choices were made by the Secretary of the Treasury, advised by the Commission of Fine Arts — the federal body that reviews the look of national monuments and coinage.

Lamb won the reverse — the "tails" side — of the $5 gold coin. And his winning design had no image at all. It was the inscription "MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL," set in four lines of flowing calligraphy at the center, with the required legends around the rim. It is the first design in U.S. Mint history made entirely of lettering — no portrait, no figure, no scene. Just words, drawn beautifully.

Lamb said the idea came straight from his trade. "It is from my experience as a calligrapher that I approached the Mount Rushmore coin design," he explained, "feeling that it might give a style and interest somewhat different from other types." It did. A coin is normally a tiny sculpture; Lamb treated it as a page.

A designer rarely cuts the coin himself. Lamb's drawing was modeled — turned into the three-dimensional relief a die can strike — by Mint sculptor-engraver William C. Cousins. On the finished coin you can find both men's marks: RL for Lamb, WC for Cousins. (The obverse — the "heads" side, with an eagle clutching sculptor's tools — was the work of the Mint's John Mercanti.)

The same year, Lamb designed the obverse of the 1991 USO 50th Anniversary silver dollar, honoring the United Service Organizations. That side carries a USO pennant and the words "50th Anniversary" — again, lettering and a simple emblem doing the work that a picture usually does. Mercanti designed its reverse, an eagle atop a globe.