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Hand punched mintmark varieties


Sir Sisu

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The differing alignment of the same mintmark "P" for each date is obvious. Do people collect these or are they just too common to take any notice?

 

I collect them. I mean, not Roosevelt dimes ofcourse, but I collect Russian coins by variety, and that most certainly is a variety. Here in Russia differences like that have been catalogued (see http://coins2001.narod.ru for example) and are keenly collected. The rarest mint mark positions can be worth quite a bit of money. If I was to collect US coins with the depth I'm in to Russians, I'd collect these too.

 

966319.jpg

 

966320.jpg

 

Compare the position of the letter "M" on the obverse

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Sisu, they are collectable but mostly by the die hard variety collectors. My idea of a dream collection is one that is a real study of a certain design. For example, I would strive to collect every date and mint of the Barber dime series first. And then I would go back through and collect the major die varieties because that is a study of how the series evolved over the course of the minting. Hand punched mintmarks may be too varied to worry about, but they do add some flavor and color to the varieties list.

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Sisu, they are collectable but mostly by the die hard variety collectors. My idea of a dream collection is one that is a real study of a certain design. For example, I would strive to collect every date and mint of the Barber dime series first. And then I would go back through and collect the major die varieties because that is a study of how the series evolved over the course of the minting. Hand punched mintmarks may be too varied to worry about, but they do add some flavor and color to the varieties list.

 

 

I like that idea of depth in one series.

 

Yeah, I assumed that the die hards of a series would definitely work on these. Myself, I guess I am somewhat like Tane, since there is such a noticeable difference between coins of the same year and mint (non-strike related), I definitely find myself keeping these in my collection as separate pieces of the same year. Would I go out of my way to acquire them - not so sure. (I came across them when examing doubles in my collection as to which to keep.) I'm just a bit surprised that as late as '85 and '89, that such obvious differences can be found in the mintmark placement. Understanding the large number of dies punched, I guess a general guideline of "align to far right of last digit in date" was abandoned?

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The different locations and orientations of the hand punched mint marks tend to drift all over the place. None really have any significent value except the ones that are punched over a few times. Those are labled as RPM's, Repunched Mint Mark, and some are even multiples. Many of those are also rather none valuable except the really noticable ones or the multiples. Many error coins are explained on pages 400 and up in the famous Red Book but not much is said about the different Mint Marks or thier locations.

On the www.coppercoins.com web site there is an extensive quantity of RPM's indicated for Lincoln Cents.

I'm rather a error coin collector and at one time I started to save all the coins with Mint Marks with really messed up locations but then stopped when I realized that was basically normal. Some are almost into the dates, others are almost off the coin, others could be anywhere.As to alignment, I sometimes wonder where those Mint workers spent their lunches.

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