Alleged coiners, meaning plagiarists: Charles Lever and Melville's Pierre Glendinning

Besides designating a minter, a maker of money, coins, the term "coiner" may refer to an author as maker of words, and to a counterfeiter.

Each of the two usages quoted below occurs in a purely literary context, exploiting the double sense of "coiner" as author and counterfeiter:

"And D'Israeli, the younger, the sparkler! whose first book is his best and is immortal. I read an odd volume of Vivian Grey every year. 

"And Lever!—the bright coiner—so they say—of other men's ore! 

"And Cooper! the American Scott, who still more than his model, wrote his brain as dry as a broken ink stand!"  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border, September 1851 and Scenes and Adventures in the Army

"SIR:—You are a swindler. Upon the pretense of writing a popular novel for us, you have been receiving cash advances from us, while passing through our press the sheets of a blasphemous rhapsody, filched from the vile Atheists, Lucian and Voltaire. Our great press of publication has hitherto prevented our slightest inspection of our reader's proofs of your book. Send not another sheet to us. Our bill for printing thus far, and also for our cash advances, swindled out of us by you, is now in the hands of our lawyer, who is instructed to proceed with instant rigor.

(Signed)           STEEL, FLINT & ASBESTOS."

...

" —Now, then, where is this swindler's, this coiner's book? Here, on this vile counter, over which the coiner thought to pass it to the world, here will I nail it fast, for a detected cheat! And thus nailed fast now, do I spit upon it, and so get the start of the wise world's worst abuse of it!"  --Melville's Pierre (1852)

Chris Morash on Lever's Post-Famine Landscape:

"In 1843, Charles Gavan Duffy devoted an entire page of The Nation (which only ran to sixteen pages) to attacking the derivative and trivial nature of Lever's early work, his Lorrequers and his O'Malleys." --Charles Lever: New Evaluations, ed. Tony Bareham